

The 

Infinite 
Artist 

Frederick 

F. 
Shannon 



iQC=J 




Copyright N^_ 



CiOEmiGlcr DEPOSm 



THE IN^FINITE AETIST 

AND 

OTHEE SEEMOl^S 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO • DALLAS 
ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO 

MACMILLAN & CO., Limited 

LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA 
MELBOURNE 

THE MACMILLAN CO. OP CANADA. Ltd. 

TORONTO 



THE INFINITE ARTIST 

^ and Other Sermons 



BY 



FEEDERICK F. SHANNON 

MINISTER OF CENTRAL CHURCH, CHICAGO, ILL. 

Author of 
'The Soul's Atlas," "The New Personality," "The En- 
chanted Universe," "The Breath in the Winds," 
"God's Faith in Man," etc. 



il3eto gork 

THE MACMH^LAN COMPANY 
1921 



All rights reserved 



PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OP AMERICA 



63 



-pK^ 



Copyright, 1921, 
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. 



Set up and printed. Published November, 1921. 



QCI 19 1921 



Press of 

J. J. Little & Ives Company 
New York, U. S. A. 

©CU624841 



tS^o tte JHemorp of 

FRANK WAKELY GUNSAULUS, 

anb to 

ADOLPHUS C. BARTLETT, 

EDWARD B. BUTLER, 

JOHN S. FIELD, 

JOHN MILLER, 

WILLIAM H. MINER, 

ROBERT H. PARKINSON, 

BERNARD E. SUNNY, 

WILLIAM C. SMITH, 

DR. HENRY B. THOMAS, 

Trustees of Central Church 
and Fellow-Workers in the 
Kingdom of Qod. 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I. The Infinite Artist 1 

II. The Larger Freedom 15 

III. Christ's Judgment of the Universe . . 26 '^ 

IV. The Iron Gate 40 

V. The Supreme Originality 52*^^ 

VI. To Athens — and Beyond! 66 

VII. Housekeeping and Soulkeeping .... 80 

VIII. :N'ew and Old 94^-^ 

IX. The Dreamer 105 

X. An Abounding Personality 117 



THE IJSTFINITE AETIST 

Am) 

OTHEE SEEMONS 



THE INFINITE ARTIST 

AND 

OTHER SERMONS 



THE iisrriJsriTE aetist 

"I will make thee an eternal excellency." — Isa. Ix, 15. 

THIS passage contains a vision of the ideal Zion. 
The actual Zion, which was steadily going from bad 
to worse, does not offer an encouraging prospect. 
Yet this great prophet is not overwhelmed by the bleak 
realism of existence; he takes refuge in the vast plans 
and high thoughts of an undiscourageable God. There- 
fore, he knew that the leaden to-day would vanish before 
the golden to-morrow. And it is just this indomitable 
faith that arms him for battle with his besieging, ob- 
stinate enemies on every hand. Faith in God alone en- 
ables man to face and endure the facts of life. There is no 
use trying to blink the tragic things away; pain does not 
pass at some word of legerdemain ; sin does not disappear 
because, perchance, fools make a mock at sin; death does 
not stand aside because delusion says that it must. Nol 
The facts of our human life must be faced ; and if faced 
in the strength which Christ alone imparts, they may be 
transfigured and made to serve the august ends of the soul. 
Consider the mixed metaphor Isaiah employs in ex- 

1 



2 The Infinite Artist and Other Sermons 

pressing this trutli. He speaks of Zion at once as a city 
"forsaken" and as a wife "hated." The city is level with 
the dust — God's judgment upon her sin; tiie wife is de- 
spised and cast off by an indignant husband because of 
her horrible adulteries. It is a forlorn picture indeed. 
But behold! within the selfsame breath another music is 
made, another hope is born, another vision is seen. 
"Whereas" — these great new resolutions are introduced by 
God — "thou hast been forsaken and hated, I will make 
thee an eternal excellency, a joy of many generations." 
In the very midst of the awful blotch an Invisible Hand 
is at work. As despair is deepened, hope is heightened. 
The Infinite Artist is already preparing His colors. And 
a painting, whatever else it requires, demands at least 
three things — an artist, a subject, and the finished pic^ 
ture. Suppose, therefore, that we allow our study to center 
about this group of ideas. I want us to humanize, indi- 
vidualize, and Christianize our text. 



Think, first, of the Infinite Artist in terms of personal- 
ism. ''I!" Here is the biggest, profoundest truth that 
can challenge human thought — the Personality of God. 
Little wonder that certain types of mind are overwhelmed 
by the idea ; it is so great, so immeasurable, so far beyond 
all ordinary concepts of personality that men are baffled 
and perplexed by the doctrine. And yet that the Christian 
God is an unthinkably great and glorious Person, is the 
only explanation that fits all the facts. For the question 
at issue is always and evermore, in the last analysis, 
whether there is a Christian God within this vast and as- 
tonishing universe. What I mean is this: It is either 
the Christian God or no god; if He is not the Christian 
God, it is too late in the evolving of life upon this planet 
for other gods to apply; they are forever outgrown and 



The Infinite Artist 3 

left behiiid in tb© march of thouglit and consciousness. 
Thus tlie question is the himdj the quality, rather than the 
variety or multiplicity of gods within the universal pan- 
theon. There are gods many and lords many, but the God 
and Father of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ — ^He 
only is the God that men can worship in spirit and in 
truth. That the Infinite Artist — ^this everlasting and 
Christian "I" — is the Personality at the heart of things, is 
reasonable from many viewpoints. 

Consider the positive evidence offered by the worship- 
er of nature. The universe is so illimitable and terrible 
and many-toned that devout souls in every age have un- 
covered in its awful presence. Stars and suns and sea- 
sons make their own appeal to particular races and indi- 
viduals, and they have done so ever since man became man. 
Dumb before the blazing galaxies, the green wonder of 
spring and the fading splendor of autumn, the perfection 
of natural law and the abounding variety of thought which 
has gone into the production and sustentation of the be- 
wildering cosmos, men have always felt, in varying de- 
grees and in differing scales of intelligence, that there was 
not only a somewhat but a Someone within and behind it 
all. Yet for twenty centuries the most deeply living and 
clearly perceiving minds of the race have been forced to 
think of this Someone in the terms and after the manner of 
Jesus the Christ, '^o other thought of God will do except 
Christ's, because the nature-worshiper invariably becomes 
like that which he worships; and nature is powerless to 
lead a human being out of and beyond herself. Where na- 
ture ends, man begins ; and if man fails to yield himself to 
the Christian God, he becomes the saddest failure in the 
whole wide world. 

A further argument for the Christian God is the philo- 
sophic speculator. This type of thinker has a high place 
in the world. He is the age-long wrestler with substance. 
Thrown down as he has been and will continue to be, he is 



4r The Infinite Aetist and Other Seemons 

up and at his antagonist again. He refuses to be entirely 
defeated; he plucks at the mystery of things; he persist- 
ently clings to the flowing garments of the ever-flowing, 
universal nature-mother. His tenacity is sublime and his 
heroism is beyond all praise. But ponder this : The 'pure 
speculator never gets beyond his speculaiion. This is his 
own confession; this is all he ever comes to — an interest- 
ing, unanswered conundrum, a brilliant, dazzling hypothe- 
sis. Some one asked me what I thought of John Burroughs' 
last book, "Accepting the Universe." I think two things 
of this interesting volume. First of all, it reminds us that 
the ultimate interest of a normal human being is religion. 
Sometime or other, religion has the fashion of thrusting 
itself forward as the major subject of our thinking. Here 
was our kindly, venerable naturalist, at the end of his long 
career, concentrating his mind upon God, the universe, the 
soul. In the second place, I replied, Mr. Burroughs' last 
book shows how utterly inadequate any thought of God, 
other than the Christian, unquestionably is. Now, I do 
not intimate that Burroughs was a great philosopher — ^he 
was a great naturalist. I fancy, for example, that he would 
be somewhat out of place in such philosophic company as 
Plato, Kant, Berkeley, Edwards, Bowne, and Bergson. 

N^evertheless, Burroughs, like all thinkers of his class, 
proves the validity of the Christian conception of God. 
After searching and reflecting upon the universe, after 
observing the ways of nature from childhood to advanced 
age, the best name that he can find for his "God" is a kind 
of N'ature Providence, something akin to an impersonal, 
universal law. Why, did I need the kindly sage of "Slal>- 
sides" to tell me as much ? The great pagans knew that ; 
your uproarious, proud-hearted, modern agnostic knows 
that. And yet how people — so-called intelligent people, 
too — like to be rhetorically deceived ! Will you not, for the 
sake of your own souls, remember the truthfulness of this 
proposition : Because one happens to be an expert in any 



The Infinite Artist 6 

given direction is no reason whatever for accepting him 
as an expert, or at all well qualified to speak, upon the 
Christian religion. He may criticize it ; he may also know 
nothing about it. He may condemn it; he may also find 
that it condemns him. He may sidestep it; he may also 
discover, before he has finished with the universe, that it 
will sidestep him. The simple fact is that the Christian 
God requires that every soul shall prove Him for its own 
self, and not another. Anything less is, at best, only the- 
ology, philosophy, speculation ; all thoroughly worth while, 
yet all thoroughly inadequate. When the Infinite Artist, 
through the living Christ, enunciates himself within the 
precincts of my own personality, may I be called, in any 
vital, thoroughgoing sense, a Christian. I may have and 
observe the ethical codes; I may keep the external rules 
and miss the Internal Fact; I may be superficially alive 
and profoundly dead. This is the paradox of the Christ- 
less soul. The mere speculator, refusing the Eternal 
Christ, is an irrefutable argument for the reality of the 
Christian God — ^that He is a Person, infinitely good, un- 
speakably near, and gloriously redemptive. 

A third proof of the Infinite Artist is the soul that acts 
as if the Christian God were the true and living God. This 
is the challenge twenty centuries old, as new as the call 
of April robins, as sweet as the breath of June roses. The 
universe is aquiver with that Holy Presence Who is mo- 
mentarily trying to attract our attention. From a million 
stations He signals to His children. He is always whis- 
pering — calling — by day and by night, from childhood to 
age. Sometimes we pause, we look, we listen, and we are 
tenderly infolded by a wordless hush. Then, as Matthew 
Arnold sang, the eye sinks inward and the life lies plain ; 
what we say we mean, and what we would we know. Chris- 
tian history and experience are distinguished by this im- 
perial truth. One day an Invisible Hand slipped out of 
the Unseen and scattered rays of blinding light all about 



6 The Infii^ite Artist and Othek Seemons 

a proud-hearted rider, throwing him prone upon the earth. 
Suddenly, like a flash of lightning, the Inmost Soul of 
the Worlds shone round about Saul of Tarsus and he bo- 
came Paul the Apostle. For the universe, at its highest 
and supremest, resolves itseK into personal relationships. 
'No abiding and epoch-making disclosures come to men 
apart from the personal. "I'' and "Thou" and "Thee" and 
"Me" — ^these are the transcendent peaks in the mountain 
ranges of reality. Paul heard a Voice, he answered a Voice, 
he obeyed a Voice ; and the Voice was the Voice of Jesus, 
Who is turning the universe into a graphophone. 

But, you reply, "Paul may have been self -deceived ; his 
mind may have been playing tricks upon itself." Very 
well! If such a human and historic fact as Paul is 
wrought by tricks, blessed are we if such tricks may be 
played upon us! If such realities are made manifest 
through fictions, then I am determined to be on good terms 
with these transfiguring fictions. A similar "trick" was 
played upon Augustine, Xavier, Luther, Wesley, Edwards, 
Beecher, Brooks, Moody — yea, and upon a multitude of 
heaven-possessed women, maidens, and youths out of every 
generation and under all skies. "By their fruits ye shall 
know them." Then scale the walls, oh, man, and behold 
the orchards of God ! Climb the fences and gaze into the 
Gardens of God! For the celestial skies and dews and 
rains of two thousand years have poured their regenerating 
tides down into those orchards and gardens. And they 
bloom and burst with fruit in every land, because the 
Christian God pursues men with a love which will not let 
them go. 

''Halts by me that footfall: 
Is my gloom, after all, 
Shade of His hand, outstretched caressingly? 
*Ah, fondest, blindest, weakest, 
I am He whom thou seekest ! 
Thou dravest love from thee, who dravest Me.' " 



The Infinite Aktist 



II 



Moreover, the Infinite Artist has a subject, as all artists 
must have. This, too, comes within the personal realm. 
"I will make thee' — not it. Going the whole round of 
creation, we shall come upon nothing higher than the in- 
tention of God to unfold the capabilities of man's soul. 
Matter, mysterious and awe-inspiring as it is, is just the 
scaffolding God uses as He toils upon the spiritual temple 
of humanity. Ages and civilizations are a part of the 
material out of which He builds. Cycles come and go; 
nations rise and fall; arts and sciences flourish and fade; 
but in all this apparent loss and death, new gains and more 
abundant life are continuously disclosed. Truly, it re- 
quires a long, dispassionate, discriminating view to ap- 
preciate the backgrounds and foregrounds of the Hidden 
Artist; but every inch of the vast canvas is aglow with 
meaningful thought-colors to the perceiving mind. While 
God works with stars and atoms, and all the varieties of 
matter between the little and the large, yet does He un- 
ceasingly toil on through these to complete the souls bear- 
ing His own image. In brief, the God of N^ature and the 
God of Grace is the selfsame God. This truth has always 
been more or less distinctly grasped by the greater minds 
of the race; and Paul has expressed it in terms, familiar 
to all Christian students: ^'For God, Who commanded 
light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, 
to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in 
the face of Jesus Christ." 

"But is the subject worth while? Is man important 
enough to command the love and wisdom of so great a God 
in so vast a universe?" These and kindred questions are 
usually asked at this juncture of our thought. And, after 
all, there are but two answers to these familiar, age-long 
queries. 

The first is the answer of materialism, which interposes 



8 The Infinite Artist akd Other Sermons 

a resounding no, a black negative. Tlie stock argument of 
materialism runs somewhat after this fashion: The uni- 
verse is so big, both in time and space, while man and his 
planet are so small in comparison, that it is inconceivable 
that so insignificant a globe and its inhabitants should 
ever disturb the thought of God — if indeed there is such a 
being. Thus, materialism is always balked in its effort to 
find God by the gigantic bogey of bigness! Infinite mil- 
lions of tons of dirt cast so much dust into the materialist's 
eyes that he goes blind to everything else. As a conse- 
quence, he keeps on his sightless way, roaring out his psean 
to "Dirt ! Dirt ! JSTothing but dirt V' His argument seems 
to be that if a man weighed as much as a star, God would 
take notice of him; but inasmuch as man is physically 
smaller than a mountain or an elephant, it is quite imposr 
sible for God to be at all aware of a man's whereabouts! 
I^ow, is it not an indisputable fact that from the sheer 
standpoint of "dirt," the materialistic creed has fallen 
upon hard times? Dirt — or matter, if you please — ^when 
brought into the court of enlightened public opinion, 
threatens to turn "state's evidence" that it may be freed 
from the evil associations of philosophic and scientific 
materialism. One of the outstanding facts of our time is 
this : Matter seems to be playing tricks with all material- 
istically-disposed minds. The modem epoch has witnessed 
such an invasion into the far, subtle, bewildering king- 
doms of matter that mind fairly threatens to make itself 
seeahle. If the materialist is not more careful as he goes 
stumbling through the provinces of actinium, polonium, 
and radium, he will be actually seen and captured by mind ! 
The farther man penetrates into the dazzling solitudes 
of matter, the nearer he comes to touching the holy gar- 
ments worn by mind itself. For Nikola Tesla and Madam 
Curie, and their army of fellow-workers in the wonders 
of matter, are proving that as we get beyond the coarser 
grades of "dirt," we seem almost in the presence of ethereal 



The Infinite Artist 9 

energies that flash with the light of intelligence. Even 
the materialist knows that an onnce of radium is worth 
more than many tons of pitchblende; is there not good 
hope of his some time realizing that his sonl is worth more 
than a whole universe of mere materialistic bigness ? ^ We 
are not men because we have skill of hand," says our great 
American scholar-statesman, "but we are men because we 
have elevation of spirit/' N'or are we less important as 
men because, forsooth, our bodies are rooted in the cosmos 
and surrounded by blazing galaxies of matter ; we are of 
value to ourselves and to God because we are capable of 
Christ-like living here and hereafter. 

The second answer is that given by Christianity. It is 
clear, definite, and adequate. This can be said of no 
other answer regarding the worth of the Infinite Artist's 
subject. Concerning this great answer through the mind 
of Christ, let us confess that civilization has scarcely 
spelled out more than a few of its golden syllables. While 
society is somewhat permeated with Christ's vision of 
human values, men are as yet hiding away in the twilight, 
blinking their half-shut eyes at its awful beauty. But 
there is a twilight preceding the dawn, as well as the 
twilight which deepens into darkness. Let us have faith 
that we are in the confusing twilight which holds the 
prophecy of a broadening day for mankind; when all 
nations, America included, shall come to the brightness 
of His international rising. 

Turning to the Master, we find His major thought to be, 
next to the Fatherhood of God, the exceeding value of 
every human to God. This is at once one of the very 
greatest thoughts of Jesus, as well as one of the most 
difficult to accept. That every human is of infinite worth 
to God — ^how men, in their luminous hours, rejoice in so 
grand a hope! Evidences asking us to think otherwise 
are always at hand, and at times almost overwhelming in 
their pessimistic emphasis. Yet, the moment we reach 



10 The Ii^Fii^iTE Aetist and Other Sermons 

the mind of Jesus, we are compelled to admit that He 
steadily and profoundly regards every individual as of 
immeasurable worth to God His Father. The fact that 
men place such little value upon themselves and other men ; 
the fact that there are countless generations with un- 
numbered millions, coming like buds in spring and going 
like leaves in autumn ; the fact that sin and crime and in- 
justice and pain and disease sweep the world like besoms 
of destruction — none of these horrible things ever swerves 
Him from the central thought that burned in His inner- 
most consciousness : The loss of a human being is so great 
because of the absolute value every human being has for 
God. Christ viewed this subject from every angle of 
thought. To bring it home to the hearts of men, He called 
upon rains and flowers and birds and sheep and coins and 
heaven and hell to assist Him. For to Christ, as to no other 
in history, the universe glows with the hot consciousness of 
Personality. "Our Father;" "My Father;" "Your 
Father" — these are variations of His immortal music. 
'"I will make thee" — our Lord and Master takes up the 
prophet's theme and lo ! the worlds and ages are so many 
chimes pealing forth the melody of individual and social 
redemption. 

"Lord God would write an epic, and the world, 
New-molded from the void, rolled into space. 
And with heaven's glittering myriads took its place, 
Sapphired with oceans and with sands empearled. 

Lord God would write an elegy. Swift grew 
Great Babylon and Memphis, Athens, Kome; 
Only to perish under dust and loam 

Of centuries, 'neath heaven's relentless blue. 

Then the Lord God, not wholly satisfied. 

Where the dawn glowed and trembled, dipt his pen 
And wrote a lyric. Ah! and then — and then 

Thou — grave and tender, smiling, starry-eyed!" 



The Infinite Artist 11 

*'I will make thee" — the blooming of the hunian over 
the walls of time and eternity is assured because onr human 
roots are strnck deep into the Heart of God. I^otwith- 
standing the long centuries between them, the pirophet and 
the philosopher are in essential accord. ^'God and His 
world are one/' says Professor Eoyce. ^^And this unity 
is not a dead natural fact. It is the unity of a conscious 
life, in which, in the course of infinite time, a divine plan, 
an endlessly complex and perfectly definite spiritual idea, 
gets expressed in the lives of countless finite beings and 
yet with the unity of a single universal life." 

Ill 

Consider that the picture, when finished, represents 
the acme of values. ^^I will make thee an eternal excel- 
lency/' God has many and various properties within 
His extensive domain ; but so far as our world is concerned, 
His most precious possessions are in human souls. To 
bring these to their best estate explains the urgency and 
piassion of the Christian thought and purpose. If the 
revelation of God in Christ is to be taken seriously, the 
physical world is just a majestic frame for the setting of 
one bearing the likeness of the God of Love. 

At least two things are implied in "an eternal excel- 
lency." First of all, there is the idea of permanent worth. 
]^ow, the only thing of abiding value is nobility of soul. 
Men always come back to that. Making wide excursions 
into the realms bounded by genius, culture, and power, 
man still experiences a kind of healthful homesickness for 
the imperishable grandeur represented in pure soul-worth. 
Think of Joan of Arc ! Taken into the torture-chamber, 
she is shown the terrible instruments by which her body is 
to be pinched and torn and broken. "Confess," exclaims 
her marble-hearted persecutor, "or you will be stripped, 
and bound, and tortured." Looking her executioners 



12 The IiirFi]sriTE Artist and Other Seemotts 

tlirotigh, she answered: "Though jou should tear me 
limb from limb, I would tell you nothing more." If 
matter is the manifestation of the divine as Force, while 
mind is the manifestation of the divine as Consciousness, 
both must come to a hushful pause before the apocalypse 
of a soul like that ! Did not the Lily Maid of France — 
and fairest of all maids save the Mother of God — ^make 
even the air-waves in that dungeon of death musical with 
her words of noble daring ? If it is great to think "upon 
the grandeur of the dooms of the mighty dead," Joan of 
Arc has made it sacramental to meditate upon that majesty 
of soul which remains at the very center of things destined 
to fade and pass. As we were going through the Art 
Institute of Chicago with Doctor Gunsaulus for our inspir- 
ing guide, he reminded that fortunate group that no 
picture can be of the first order of excellence which lacks 
a human figure. There are, of course, great paintings, 
like those of Turner, which are among the glories of art. 
And yet, however superior in execution, there is a certain 
vacancy in all canvases lacking "the human face divine." 
If this be in any sense true of art, how emphatically true 
it is of human life. It is greatness of soul only that 
satisfies man; as nothing less can satisfy God, He is 
agelessly striving to make man understand that he is the 
hiding-place of values whose realization and preservation 
must abundantly justify the travail and tragedy of history. 
The second fact to be considered is the immeasurable 
beauty nestling at the heart of these words. "I will make 
thee an eternal excellency/" God is not content to grow 
permanent, worthful souls; they must also flame with the 
ultimate beauty. So precious is His picture to the Infinite 
Artist that Hie commands all the great human colors to 
have part in His work. "The human artist," says A. 
Clutton-Brock in his golden book on the Kingdom of 
Heaven, "works in dead matter, not in living creatures; 
if he did, he would be a monster ; and there are those who 



The Infinite Artist 13 

would make a monster of God Himself." Inasmucli as I 
have no inclination to even suggest such a thought of God 
in this study, and inasmuch as God assuredly "works in 
living creatures/' why not enlarge our conceptions of Who 
and What the Infinite Artist really is? Is not God 
infinitely wiser, better, stronger than all our thoughts of 
Him? Therefore, I like to think that He is constantly 
employing those mystic colors named joy and sorrow, hope 
and despair, health and sickness, wisdom and ignorance, 
youth and age, love and hate, life and death to give His 
human canvas the incomparable fineness of "an eternal 
excellency." For after all beautiful things have lost their 
beauty, beautiful souls go steadily on to a deepening 
beauty. "On this earth of ours," says Maeterlinck, "there 
are but few souls that can withstand the dominion of a 
soul that has suffered itself to become beautiful." It is 
the very truth of God, surely! Some are able to with- 
stand the dominion of a beautiful soul, it is true ; but look 
where you will, even amid the muck and mire of history, it 
is the lilied souls that hold their white and stainless 
dominion over the ugly and untoward. And why? Be- 
cause of the beauty of God within them ! Energized and 
transfigured by His own undying beauty and goodness, 
God's children experience those strokes of inner loveliness 
which continue to deepien even as all outer forma shrivel 
and change. "One flower, one tree, one baby, one bird 
singing, or one little village," it has been finely said of a 
fine soul, "would move her to love and praise as surely as 
a garden, a forest, a university, an orchestra, or a great 
city." She could, in the words of Henry Vaughan — 

'Teel through all this fleshly dress 
Bright shoots of everlastingness." 

A characterful human is the pledge of a character-filling 
God. And does He not give beauty for ashes ? Ah, yes, 
He "will beautify the meek" with "the perfection of 



14 The Infinite Artist and Other Sermons 

beauty." Therefore, there are two ptrayers that Christians 
should pray every day of their lives. One is that antique 
prayer for individual beauty : "One thing have I desired 
of the Lord, that will I seek after; that I may dwell in 
the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold 
the beauty of the Lord, and to enquire in Hiis temple." 
The other is that ancient pietition, which reveals the secret 
of all social beauty: "Lei Thy work appear unto Thy 
servants, and Thy glory unto their children. And let the 
beauty of the Lord our Grod be upon us: and establish 
Thou the work of our hands upon us ; yea, the work of our 
hands establish Thou it." By making these our daily 
prayers we shall ever be more purposely playing into 
the tender, shaping hands of that Infinite Artist who finds 
chaos and creates harmony, who finds tears and creates 
joy, who finds sin and creates holiness, who finds desolation 
and creates "an eternal excellency." For to-day, as in the 
yesteryears — 

"God speaks to hearts of men in many ways : 
Some the red banner of the rising sun 
Spread o'er the snowclad hills has taught His praise, 
Some the sweet silence when the day is done : 
Some after loveless lives at length have won 
His word in children's hearts and children's gaze. 
And some have found Him where low rafters ring 
To greet the hand that helps, the heart that cheers ; 
And some in prayer, and some in perfecting 
Of watchful toil through unrewarding years; 
And some not less are His, who vainly sought 
His voice, and with His silence have been taught — 
Who bear His chain that bade them to be bound, 
And at the end in finding not, have found." 



II 

THE LAEGEE EEEEDOM 

"And Agrippa said unto Festus, This man might have been 
set at liberty, if he had not appealed unto Caesar." — ^Acts xxvi. 32. 

History in the making is a kind of insoluble riddle. It 
seems so contradictory and immoral that it is at once 
bewildering and chaotic. Consider the three figures in 
my text as an illustration. Put yourselves back in that 
last half of tbe first Christian century. Look at these 
three men — Herod Agrippa 11. , Porcius Eestus, and tbeir 
prisoner. Everything seems to side with the king and 
governor, while the chained apostle makes a sorry figure 
indeed. Sorry, I mean, to history in the making. But 
history made has another story to tell. 'Now that we view 
Herod and Eestus and Paul through historic and spiritual 
second sight, not one of us would be willing to exchange 
places with Paul, on the one hand, and with Agrippa and 
Festus, on the other. And why ? Because we know that 
moral worth outweighs., in the scales of history, the 
immoral and ungodly. To history in the making, men 
appear somewhat like uncut diamonds. The Dudley 
Diamond, for exfample, originally weighed more than 
eighty-eight carats ; but after being cut, it was reduced by 
half. Thus to history in the making, our human 
diamonds bulk large and very brilliant. The Herods and 
the Festuses march at the head of the column. But after 
history has been finished, and these gentlemen are 
cut to their true proportions, we make considerable effort 
to see them at all, while the Pauls and Johns and Peters 

15 



16 The Iitfinite Artist and Other Sermons 

meet us everywhere. They flash a deepening splendor 
down our roads of life. They are the men and women who 
choose and are choosing the larger freedom rather than 
the smaller, though gilded, slavery. They, too, might 
have been set at liberty, such as it was, but they made 
their appeal unto those moral ubiquities which change not, 
enjoying high freedom and imperishable fame. 



First of all, let us test this law of the larger freedom by 
the sense of right. There are people, of course, who have 
no deep sense of right; therefore, the law means nothing 
to them. Then there are people who have fitful, moment- 
ary glimpses of right. They resemble those underworld 
creatures who come up into the sunlight for a brief 
period, but for the most part dwell in the darkness. There 
are others, however, who keep their consciences in tune 
with right, with which "can be no variation, nor shadow 
that is cast by turning.'' They believe that black is black 
and white is white. They live according to their belief, 
and they speak according to their life. Like Paul, they 
might have the lesser liberty, but they choose the larger 
freedom and are willing to pay the price for it. 

]^ow we must say two things about these uncompromis- 
ing disciples of the highest. In the first place, they are 
most disconcerting. They are invariably upsetting our 
conventional views and practices. Like the two char- 
acters in "Flammonde," they make "life awkward for 
their friends," just because their friends are pursuing 
awkwardly unmoral, if not immoral, lives. We never 
can tell exactly what they are going to say out loud ; they 
keep us on the tiptoe of wonder and of nameless dread, 
making us feel like those politicians who have their ears 
to the ground and from whom self-respecting folk turn 
with "averted gaze 5" soon or late, they are certain to pull 



The Laegeb Freedom 17 

down the flimsy pillars supporting our house of make^ 
believe. Well do I remember one of this kind. Some- 
times he walks with me in my waking hours; at other 
times he journeys with me in the mystic realms of dream. 
Weaponed with great thoughts and honest eyes and plain 
speech, he challenged the insincerity of the individual or 
group. It was not difficult for him to stand alone, because 
a certain native and acquired nobility of purpose set him 
in a class by himself. Oh, the inspiring scorn he poured 
into our vacant molds of being! His very presence was 
salubrious. He gave us the sense of high human grandeur. 
We did not always receive his gift with thankful hearts. 
Eeing morally sick ourselves and incapable of breathing 
the fine air which supported him, his gift was usually as 
unpleasant to take as a dose of medicine. Yet did his 
tonic manhood help to make us manfully well and we are 
increasingly grateful to him in the come and go of the 
years. 

Such souls are not only disconcerting, but the habit of 
the world is to be rudely impatient with them. Of course 
the reason for this treatment of human genuineness is not 
far to seek. Most of us are experts in the matter of 
expediency. ^^Men," says Lowell, "are generally more 
desirous of being improved in their portraits than in their 
characters." Therefore, these singular people who em- 
phasize character first and portrait-painting second, if at 
all, have the faculty of evoking the scornful impatience of 
the hedonist. Rebuking the acquisitive, sensational, 
pleasure-mongering majority, these disciples of the life 
which is life indeed seem to be pathetically out of place in 
this world of vigor and rigor. And yet, in the true vision 
of things, are they, after all, the figures over whom we 
should break our alabasters of sympathy? Certainly 
not! While they are busy losing the world with all its 
pomps and gauds, they are gloriously gaining their souls, 
with all their joys and satisfactions. Refusing the lower 



18 The In^finite Aetist and Othee Seemoits 

liberty, they are joyous bondslaves of tbe higher freedom. 
They have inalienable rights of soul which they refuse to 
barter away; these have they earned by silent struggle 
and unpublished sacrifice; and unto these rights do they 
appeal when false doors of liberty open to admit them into 
realms unworthy and untrue. Emily Dickinson has com- 
memorated these august lives in one of her quaintest, 
sweetest songs. True poetic sister of William Blake, her 
verses are "like poetry torn up by the roots, with rain and 
dew and earth still clinging to them, giving a freshness 
and a fragrance not otherwise to be conveyed." Here are 
the lines: 

"To fight aloud is very brave. 
But gallanter, I know, 
Who charge within the bosom. 
The cavalry of woe. 

Who win, and nations do not see, 
Who fall, and none observe, 
Whose dying eyes no country 
Eegards with patriot love. 

We trust, in plumed procession. 
For such the angels go, 
Bank after rank, with even feet 
And uniforms of snow." 



II 

There is a second way in which the larger freedom 
asserts itself. It is in the choice of heavenly fame as 
compared with vulgar notoriety. I am not sure but here 
is one of the fatal weaknesses of the Church of the 
twentieth century. To-day, as in no former age, ministers 
and churches have the opportunity of sending their names 
to the ends of the earth. The newspaper, the magazine, 
the pamphlet, the book are vehicles in which one's name 
may ride around the globe. The advantages of this are at 



The Laeger Freedom 19 

once great and perilous. "But," you ask, "is it not one's 
duty to reach as many people as possible? Why not 
preach to hundreds as well as to scores, to thousands as 
well as to hundreds, to tens of thousands as well as to a 
few thousands?'' Well, why not indeed? There is no 
reason, surely, for not doing so, if — and what a tremendous 
if it is ! — if the preachers and churches are not victimized 
by the dry rot of superficial notoriety. When Doctor Big 
I^oise begins to rattle around in a city or community he 
needs to be prayerfully labored over, lest he sell himself 
to the hucksters of vulgarity and forget the weightier 
matters of life and character. Is it not pathetic, even 
tragic, when we attempt to conceal our essential godless- 
ness behind our unctuous, pious phrases ? For when many 
men begin to sip the wine of fame they soon have little 
taste for the water of life, and their words rattle around 
with reverberant emptiness. The possibilities of egoism 
in average human nature are immense. Herein is the 
message, as well as the warning, of "The Egoist," by 
George Meredith. Stevenson ranks this book very high, 
holding that it stands in a place by itself. Once, in agony, 
a young friend of Meredith came to him and cried : "This 
is too bad of you. Willoughby is me!" "JSTo, my dear 
fellow," said Meredith, "he is all of us." 

But to draw a life-portrait of every human, as Meredith 
does, is not to correct our shortcomings. Diagnosis, how- 
ever important, is not a cure. And that is what I am 
coming at in this phase of our study. What is the remedy 
for this injurious streak, this itching lust after publicity, 
so deeply ingrained in human nature ? It lies in Christ's 
mastership of the soul, the active, indwelling Fatherhood 
of God, continuously witnessing unto His own life-giving 
presence. Here, as always, Jesus points the way. He 
opens the doors of that temple of heavenly fame from 
which the mawkish automatically excludes itself. "Take 
heed," Hie says, "that ye do not your righteousness before 



20 The Iistfinite Artist and Other Sermons 

men, to be seen of them ; else ye have no reward with your 
Father Who is in Heaven." There are times when men 
must be regarded ; there are also times when men must be 
ignored. Blessed is the soul who, duly regardful of the 
rights of man, is wisely jealous of the rights of God. 
Leaving the human behind, he urges his way into the 
fellowship of the Most High. It is in God, and in God 
alone, that he receives strength to live his own life inspir- 
ingly and helpfully. Without this continuous charisma 
of the Divine, we quickly fall victims to the babble around 
us and augment the verbal noise by becoming mere 
babblers ourselves. A second illustration of the Master is 
true prayer. In contrast to those play-actors, bitten by 
the poison of irreligion in the guise of worship, He says: 
^^But thou, when thou pray est, enter into thine inner 
chamber, and having shut thy door, pray to thy Father 
Who is in secret, and thy Father Who seeth in secret shall 
recompense thee." Thus, if we really live at all, we live 
in this holy realm of personal relations. Anything short 
of this is not Christian; it may partake of any one of 
many isms or cults, even of respectable philosophic 
systems; but anything less than the living, personal God 
and the responsible human soul is unchristian. The quiet- 
ness of the inner chamber and the shut door are the true 
antidote for this wild, obnoxious publicity-sickness which 
has attacked multitudes in our time, l^either the preacher, 
the individual Christian, nor the Church will ever be 
favorably known unto those it is their duty to save and 
serve, until each and all are intimately known unto God. 
Good deeds and noble lives advertise themselves; the 
yellow press will see to it that the other varieties are kept 
well to the front. 

Let us consider, moreover, that the pursuers of heavenly 
fame hold the long future ; they are momentarily marching 
toward their crowning day, while the others have already 
had the only coronation they deemed worth while, their 



The Lakgeb Feeedom 21 

fading, tarnislied crowns now being fit for only tlie rust- 
heap. Set over against these meretricious characters, for 
example, the father of the late Doctor James Denney, one 
of the outstanding theologians of our generation. "One 
of the things that has never been out of my mind," says 
the son, "since I went to Broughty Ferry and got four 
hundred pounds a year, is that my father worked from 
six in the morning till six at night, and often longer, from 
the time he was twelve till he died at seventy-two, never 
had a month's holiday in his life, and never made a 
seventh or an eighth of my income, though he was, in every 
sense of the term, as good a man as I am. The distri- 
bution of the rewards of labour between us was absurd." 
And the son is right; we know that the inequalities of 
temporal reward are unjust ; but is there not, in this very 
feeling, the burning prophecy of a coming day when such 
injustices must be rectified? Otherwise, the universe is 
without moral order. 

And yet, if it were not for the enriching values con- 
tributed to society by these loyal, suppressed lives, how 
poor humanity would be! Such lives remind us of that 
subterranean river in Spain. About thirty miles from 
its source the Guadiana is lost among swamps and finally 
disappears altogether. But here and there the invisible 
river throws up pools to the surface. The natives poet- 
ically name these pools "the eyes of the Guadiana." They 
are only tiny lakelets, but they indicate that the unseen 
river is flowing on by day and by night. Despite all 
handicaps, the submerged stream at last makes its con- 
tribution to the hospitable sea. !N^ow the sea and God are 
alike in this : The one has immense depths and innumer- 
able waves and billows, but it waits to welcome every 
mountain brook and every April raindrop ; the Other has 
universes, angels, and men incalculable, but the Father of 
spirits is too poor not to miss one lost, strayed human. 
Yet, when this same blessed God, Who doeth wonders in 



22 The Infin^ite Artist ai^d Othee Sermons 

secret and toils on in silence, feels in His own conscious- 
ness the trembling tug of one of His awe-clad, silent souls, 
scorning the low and untrue, think you not that He hath 
greater joy than when a new world is born out of the 
firemist ? For here is a finite soul akin indeed to His own 
Infinite Being; and one soul, in Heaven's estimate, is 
worth more than galaxies of dead matter. Such belong to 
that white-robed society who refuse the tawdry fame of 
earthly liberty and appeal unto the larger freedom which 
grows with the growing cycles. It is of these that our 
New England poet sings: 

"One feast, of holy days the crest, 

I, though no Churchman, love to keep. 
All- Saints, — the unknown good that rest 

In God's still memory folded deep; 
The bravely dumb that did their deed, 

And scorned to blot it with a name. 
Men of the plain heroic breed. 

That loved Heaven's silence more than fame. 

Such lived not in the past alone, 

But thread to-day the unheeding street. 
And stairs to Sin and Famine known 

Sing with the welcome of their feet; 
The den they enter grows a shrine. 

The grimy sash an oriel burns. 
Their cup of water warms like wine. 

Their speech is filled from Heavenly urns. 

About their brows to me appears 

An aureole traced in tenderest light. 
The rainbow-gleam of smiles through tears 

In dying eyes, by them made bright. 
Of souls that shivered on the edge 

Of that chill ford repassed no more. 
And in their mercy felt the pledge 

And sweetness of the farther shore." 



The Laegeb Fkeedom 23 



III 



There is a third way in which the larger freedom mani- 
fests itself. We see it in those souls who deliberately choose 
to amass less property that they may earn more personality 
for God and man. To this end — ^the growing of Christlike 
personality — ^the universe seems to be dedicated. There 
are many things in the cosmos which apparently contra- 
dict this conception. Yet, on the whole, the truth that 
the Divine intention fro^m the beginning of things was 
to piroduce Godlike human beings, is fairly well authen- 
ticated by history and experience. Scientists say that 
our world has brought forth no new physical creature for 
vast, almost inconceivable stretches of time. True, all of 
our civilizations and discoveries necessarily fall within 
the human period, and we are still bat upon the threshold 
of discovery and invention; but we must remember that 
the stuffs out of which our inventions are wrought were 
originally stored up in our world-house ; man has unpacked 
and made them into various forms and uses. Now, how- 
ever, the real battleground is inner and spiritual; the 
contending forces are waging their warfare within the 
realm of personality. Pictorially speaking, on the one 
side is the will of God, on the other side are all intelligent 
wills, good and evil, and in the midst is this huge colosseum 
of roaring energy and matter, strewn with the wreckage 
of an unfinished humanity. 

Now, within the historic period, the world has never 
been wanting in those elect souls who were more eager to 
grow personality than to get property. Their number, to 
be sure, is relatively small, but in sheer worth tO' the world 
they immeasurably outweigh all the others. That a man 
named Moses once lived on this planet is of immense 
significance to all men. The sobs and songs of a David 
lend a meaning to the sobs and songs of the marching, 
bleeding, triumphant multitudes. Isaiah's flaming vision 



24 The Infin^ite Aetist and Othee Seemows 

of God is an unqueaicliable light whereby we may behold 
the Lord, high and lifted up, when all petty earthly 
sovereigns are level with the dust. As for Paul, who 
brought the seed of liberty from Asia to Europe, and 
thence to America, we pronounce the names of Agrippa 
and Festus solely because they once looked upon that 
apostolic face. The character of Jesus, in whose com- 
parison all human whites are inks, is worth more to 
commerce, education, art, science, and music than all the 
millionaires, educators, artists, scientists and musicians 
living, dead, and unborn. Then what is Jesus worth to 
the souls of men? The new heavens and the new earth 
alone shall tell! 

But these human and divine mountain peaks stand not 
altogether alone. "Though I see well enough" — Carlyle 
wrote to Emerson after reading "Representative Men"— 
"what a great cleft divides us, in our ways of practically 
looking at this world, I see also (as probably you do your- 
seK) where the rock-strata, miles deep, unite again: and 
the two souls are at one." It is likewise true of the unity 
of the great spiritual rock-strata; they are not separable 
by continents or ages; they are indissolubly one in the 
unifying power of their Lord and Master. Think of John 
Eliot giving himself to the Indians. Having no written 
language of their own, Eliot created a language, and then- 
translated the Bible into that language — ^the first printed 
Bible in America. Picture this Christian gentleman, 
this university scholar, refusing to make money that he 
might help God make men. See him on the very last day 
of his life, a broken, feeble, faithful old man, teaching the 
alphabet to an Indian boy sitting by his bedside. Weep 
not for John Eliot, my friends; let us rather weep for 
ourselves because we have so little of his heroic, sacrificial 
spirit. Think of this little church in Kentucky sending 
forth one hundred preachers and missionaries during the 
century and a half of its existence! With a seating 
capacity of only three hundred and fifty, that building is 



The Largee Freedom 25 

probably better known in Heaven tban many cathedrals 
centuries old and with a seating capacity of thousands. 
A generous public contribution was recently made for the 
benefit of a family of orphan children at Evanston. And 
how did they become orphans ? Why, when their parents 
were crossing the railroad tracks, the mother's foot became 
inextricably fastened between the rails. But look! 
Yonder comes a fast train thundering down upon them 
and the engineer cannot stop his grinding wheels of de- 
struction. But is not the father and husband free ? He 
can set himself at liberty, and the children need him. 
!N'ever! Se is bound by invisible fetters mightier than 
cables of gravity. Looking that oncoming train in the 
face, he said: "I will not leave you, dear.'' And he 
died consoling his companion. But did he do right? 
Leave that question for casuists to debate. The moral 
sublimity of that act teaches some of us the wisdom of 
silence and the grandeur of tears. Last summer at 
Niagara Falls I was again reminded of the death of that 
young bride and bridegroom some winters ago. They 
were walking on the ice, which suddenly gave way. 
Frantic warnings came, but it was too late. Heroic efforts 
at rescue were made, but all in vain. Thousands worked 
and watched and wept from shore and bridge. But 
steadily did that icy barge of death, bearing its immortal 
cargo of youthful lovers, drift on toward the Falls. While 
many faces were turned away in the moment of the fatal 
plunge, this is what others saw: They saw thai gallant 
lover remove his coat and lovingly wrap it around his 
bride. But is not a man in the moment of perilous death 
at liberty to think of himself ? 'No ! J^ot if he is noble 
enough to forget himself and make his appeal unto the 
self-forgetting God, Who nerves his soul with such holy 
daring and chivalrous regard for another, that he not only 
defies physical death but enswathes it in the undying 
splendor of life. 



CHEIST'S JUDGMENT OF THE UNIVEESE 

"And He went forward a little, and fell on His face, and 
prayed, saying, My Father, if it be possible, let tins cup pass 
away from Me : nevertheless, not as I will, but as Thou wilt." — 
St. Matthew xxvi. 39. 

There are gardens and gardens, but Gethsemane is the 
strangest, most mysterious of all. There are gardens of 
white, and gardens of purple, and gardens of gold, but here 
is a garden of red. And is it not passing strange that 
this oriental garden is so profoundly astir to-night ? Is 
not this a place of habitual quietude and restfulness — 
where tangled glooms shut out the heat of day, where 
Jerusalem's distraotions dare not inl^ude, where per- 
chance the sound of running water winds mysteriously 
through the channels of dream ? 'No ; this is not a garden 
of romance or reverie now ; it has suddenly become a place 
of agonizing struggle, a place of world-deep revelation. 
Forces of good and evil are concentrated here in formi- 
dable phalanxes; something must be overthrown — some- 
thing must be triumphant. A universe in shuddering 
necessity is asserting its plea to-night ; therefore, indecision 
or indifference to its claims is out of place, even as the 
black and trembling hours are out of joint. Yet there is 
a Gardener here — a Gardener from behind the stars! Is 
He not searching about through all the dark spaces of His 
garden in quest of flowers? And lo! He finds them. 
One is the Flower of Agony, and one is the Flower of 
Trust, and one is the Flower of Fatherhood. But laying 
aside all figures of speech, is not Gethsemane the place in 

26 



Christ's Judgment of the Univeese 27 

which our Lord's judgment of the universe is pronounced ? 
Let us consider, therefore, what He found, and what He 
makes it possible for His friends, servants, and lovers to 
find. 

I 

Keflecting upon Christ's judgment of the universe, as 
disclosed in Gethsemane, He found a universe in agony. 
Entering into and sharing that mysterious agony at the 
soul of things. He was made to shudder and cry aloud, 
"If it be possible, let this cup pass away from Me." What 
is this but the reaction of the Divine Soul toward a uni- 
verse in travail? It is wonderful beyond words to 
meditate upon an interplanetary system in the process of 
becoming. We reckon with the Mind that conceived it, 
with the Will that produced it, with the Power that mo- 
mentarily sustains it, and our finite intelligence is op^ 
pressed even while it is thrilled with awe. Yet when we 
consider the obstinacy of matter, the instinct of the animal, 
the mind of the human — ^the refined inner stuff and sub- 
stance of organic and inorganic realms^ — ^we are compelled 
to ask if it is possible for God to complete such a physical 
and spiritual scheme named the Kingdom of Heaven with- 
out suffering, without agony ? "For we know," says Paul, 
"that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain 
with us until now." The cosmos itself is undergoing a 
kind of vast, agonizing birth-throe, quivering with the 
pangs characteristic of universal motherhood, in which 
man is a keenly sensitive participant. 

Yonder in that Garden of Mystery, where thought must 
always remain in the kneeling posture, our Lord is most 
acutely experiencing the dark things inherent in a world 
such as ours. Inasmuch as He was so finely strung, so 
unutterably keyed to truth and mercy and justice and love, 
His ocean-deep Nature likewise felt the sorrow and sym- 
pathy and indignation which imperfection and injustice 



28 The Infinite Artist and Other Sermons 

invariably elicit from all higli souls. Here in tlie Garden 
He seems like One on some strange island of enigma. 
Wild seas of terror are rolling in from the deeps of infinite 
night and lashing that lonely spot with awful fury. What 
murky billows are these breaking all around Him ! They 
are colored with sin, weakness, ignorance, misunderstand- 
ing, jealousy, hate, and inhumanity. Islanded and alone 
in the universe, He seems to be slowly engulfed within 
the black abysses of these many-colored, smothering bil- 
lows. "If it be possible," He cries, as He sinks beneath 
it all, "let this cup pass away from Me." The suffering 
wrought by this poisoned wine of being is too dread for 
even the lips of God to taste. Take it away — oh ! take it 
away, lest creation be deprived of its Creator ! Whatever 
it all means, we are sure of this: The Son of Man and 
the Son of God is at close and deadly grips with the 
problem of evil. 

Making a closer analysis, we may say that the Saviour is 
sharing in two kinds of the universal agony. First, but 
not most important. He experienced the terror of evil on 
its physical side. Think you that He was unaware of 
the problem, as old as the ages, growing out of the destruc- 
tive forces arrayed against man and beast — storm, flood, 
earthquake, famine, pestilence, and disease? It is un- 
thinkable that this tremendous problem should have es- 
caped the mind and experience of the world's only Saviour. 
But into whatever mind this question really comes, there 
is mental suffering. The laws of thought will not permit 
it to be ignored ; yet those very laws cannot entirely pluck 
the heart out of this mystery. Hence the resultant 
dilemma, the strong crying and tears. Why was that man 
bom blind, and that one a life-long cripple, and that one a 
loathsome leper? "Because of heredity, or disease, or 
ignorance !" you exclaim. But why did a good God make 
a world in which such things are possible? Thus does 
your answer simply set in motion a train of questions 



Christ's Judqmeitt of the Univeese 29 

asked by blatant infidels and sincere doubters in every age. 
But whatever the solution, we know that Jesus felt the in- 
tolerable burden and mystery of physical evil. The value 
of life — the joy of being — far more than comj^ensated Him 
for all the handicaps attending it. He taught that all evil 
is not sin, though sin is evil. Seeing a man blind from 
his birth, the disciples asked Jesus : ^^Rabbi, who sinned, 
this man, or his parents, that he should be born blind?" 
The question voices the belief of all ages and, in some 
measure, of all peoples — that all physical evil is the result 
of sin. Jesus says no! "Neither did this man sin, nor 
his parents: but that the works of God should be made 
manifest in him." Here is one of the supreme contribu- 
tions to thought concerning the place of evil in a universe 
in the making. Physical evil is tolerable if God works 
through it toward some glorious end; otherwise, would it 
not shrivel up man's soul and paralyze his nerve of faith ? 
But it is the spiritual phase of evil — ^the mystery of 
iniquity — that is most baffling and overwhelming to deep- 
living souls. By reason of the very superiority and sen- 
sitiveness of His powers our Lord felt the violence, the 
deadliness, and the ravages of sin as no other was capable 
of feeling them. Always aware of this dread thing, hiding 
like a grim specter in the background of life when it was 
not writhing in the foreground, yet on that last night in 
Gethsemane did it seem to oppress Him with a species of 
unspeakable horror. The very moment He enters the 
Garden He is enfolded in a darkness behind and within 
the darkness. Mysterious powers of evil — subtle, weird, 
preternatural — are suddenly released against Him. The 
earth is all atremble and the skies drip terror. He enters 
upon a struggle which threatens to tear reason up by the 
roots. Braver than the bravest, more heroic than the most 
heroic, the Lord Jesus is here face to face with a foe that 
defies the most extraordinary bravery and heroism. There- 
fore, to spieak of Jesus as one of the martyrs is a species 



30 The Infiitite Artist and Other Sermons 

of spiritual stupidity. In the presence of this besieging, 
orusliing, loathsomei antagonism, continuing unto; His 
heartbreak on Calvary, with which Christ is wrestling 
under the olives, terms like courage, bravery, and martyr- 
dom have no place simply because they contain no mean- 
ings big enough to fit His experience and work. Thus, 
while all words and figures are inadequate to define that 
which does not and cannot come within the requirements 
of definition, is it too much to say this: In the Garden, 
where the roots of His Divine Emotion put forth crimson 
tears, the Redeemer begins to drink the deeper draughts 
from that cup of sin which overflowed on Calvary, and 
which, instead of permitting it to be taken away. He 
drained to the deepmost dregs. Be not surprised that for 
a time the unfathomable contents of that Cup quenched 
the light of the sun even while its mephitic vapors shut 
out the Face of God. Too awful for words, the soul 
simply kneels here hushedly and adoringly. "If it be 
possible, let this cup pass away from Me." Yea, there 
are depths and vastnesses in sin's malignant nature which 
cause even the feet of Deity to draw back with trembling ! 
Let us here enforce a much-needed lesson for our time. 
If Christ disclosed a universe in the throes of physical and 
spiritual agony — a cosmos in process of becoming as well 
as a cosmos groaning under its weight of sin — ^how false 
and unchristian it is to minify human sin, and, con- 
sequently, human responsibility therefor. Let us look the 
facts in the face. Freely grant that physical evil may 
be a kind of shavings in the workshop of creation, but give 
no such hostages to sin — ^the act of a will either enslaved 
by or in unholy love of wrong; that destroys the fairest 
of human possibilities; yea, it enshadows the light of 
God's countenance and smites His heart through with un- 
apipeasable ache and yearning over children determined to 
walk in the devious ways of death and final despair. N'o 
teacher can be a true friend of right and spieak lightly of 



Christ's Judgment of the Univeese 31 

sin. Excuse it as we may, apologize for our own sinful- 
ness as we will, let us remember tliat tlie black, dire fact 
is bere — an opiate in tbe will, a frenzy in tbe imagination, 
a madness in tbe brain, a poison in tbe beart. Culture 
cannot extract it; art cannot conceal it; indifference can- 
not forego it; foolisb cults cannot clear it away. Some- 
wbat grimly but truly does Emily Dickinson sing: 

"I like tbe look of agony, 

Because I know it's true : 
Men never sbam convulsion. 
Or simulate a tbroe." 

Likewise, in keeping witb Cbrist, Paul, Augustine, and 
all otber profound natures refusing to drink tbe wine of 
delusion, does anotber great modern singer express tbe 
trutb : 

"Notbing begins and nothing ends 
That is not paid witb moan ; 
We are born in other's pain, 
And perisb in our own." 

II 

Wbile our Saviour found agony in tbe universe. He 
found something more and greater — ^BDe found mastery, 
triumph over pain and mystery. Hear tbe sublime roll 
of that heart-red threnody from Gethsemane: "Never- 
theless, not as I will, but as Thou wilt." Here are two 
ways of approach to tbe prof oundest of problems : First, 
there is tbe unavailing way — the way of sheer struggle, of 
matching the naked will with the gigantic forces opposed 
to it. Groaning within itseK undemeatb the olives of 
mystery and staining the very grass with its bloody sweat, 
it cries: "I will — I will — I will cleave my way through 
it all. Every black foe of opposition must go down before 
me!" Such resolution and steadfastness are daring, 
heroic, sublime. They may well defy tbe covering night 



32 The Infiitite Artist aistd Other Sermons 

througlL the "unconquerable soul." For tlie fury of seas, 
the wild grandeur of storms, the terror of earthquake, the 
splendor of galaxies — ^what are these mindless powers 
compared with that mindful, self-conscious intelligence 
lodged in the human will? They cannot be compared 
because they belong to different orders. "If the entire 
physical universe should conspire to crush a man/' said 
Paschal, "the man would still be greater than the entire 
physical universe, because he would know that he was 
crushed." The superiority of the frailest self -conscious- 
ness over infinite masses of matter is immeasurable. And 
yet the gaunt "I will !" of human courage set over against 
life's roaring seas of evil is a kind of bleak and barren 
coast unvisited by singing birds and unsweetened by fra- 
grant flowers. It is a will that goes deep, let us say, but 
not deep enough. It fails to sink its roots into the water 
of life. Hence the barrenness in the midst of its own 
admirable, cold, white majesty. Do we not know men and 
women who have thus armed themselves ? They fight with 
deathless fortitude; but can we say that they bring onto 
the battlef ront those reenf orcements which not only make 
victory sure, but also make the victory worth while ? For 
after every conquest stands this question, which will not 
down : Was the battle worth fighting, and was the spirit 
in which the victory was won the spirit of right ? In the 
end of the day the question is not^ — Does the end justify 
the means? nor, Do the means justify the end? but: 
Were both means and end atremble with the breath of 
right, of God ? And just because of this lower, unavailing 
way, because of this unilluminated wilfulness in man, the 
physical evil of the universe has been vastly augmented, 
life has been poisoned at its roots, and, therefore, we have 
these sere, murky leaves upon the tree of being instead of 
rich, ripe fruitage — good men and women, as Milton 
suggests, being the fairest fruits the earth lifts up to God. 
If the foul rivers of iniquity dug by mail's own hands 



Christ's Judgment of the Universe 33 

were suddenly converted into channels of purity, such 
streams of healthful irrigation would roll around the earth 
that the desert would blossom and the jungle become a 
veritable garden of God. 

Over against this unavailing way, consider the Master's 
method. "^Nevertheless/' — ^though I have done My utmost 
and though My will is set upon another way — ^^iNeverthe- 
less," — ^oh, can you not feel this vaster, deeper inbreathing 
of the Everlasting Goodness? — ^^Nevertheless, not as I 
will, but as Thou wilt." Consider the threefold aspect of 
the Saviour's victory. First of all, there is what we may 
characterize as revision. What had Jesus been saying and 
doing up to this fateful hour ? That God was His Father, 
that He and the Father understood each other, that He had 
come from Heaven to earth to save men from their sins, 
that He would die upon the Cross, and rise again on the 
third day. These were among the things our Lord had 
been teaching, and they were wondrously attested by His 
own character, as well as by His deeds of mercy and love. 
In brief. He came with a program. Always sure of Him- 
self, clothed in an atmosphere of serenity which absorbed 
the fogs of worry and mistrust. He had kept the path of 
His Saviourhood as grandly and as luminously as a star 
keeps its orbit. And behold! here at last are bloody 
wrestlings and agonizing prayers and mysterious struggles 1 
What does it all mean ? It means that He was a Saviour 
in fact — ^that, however much more. He was one with like 
passions as ourselves ; that, grapple as He alone could with 
the awfulness and tragedy of sin, there was yet within it 
an element of deepiening surprise and oppressive frightful- 
nesa that agitated Him to the utmost. Had He not 
hitherto found the cup of sin bitter enough? Think of 
the opposition, the misunderstanding, the ignorance, the 
hypocrisy, the malignance always standing athwart His 
path. But now that cup — ^that galling, gruesome, blister- 
ing cup He had come to drink — suddenly discloses un- 



34 The Ii^fii^ite Aetist and Other SEEMoi^rs 

imagined miseries and undreamed ignominies within its 
boiling deptlis. For a little moment His great, dear, pure 
Soul shrank back. ^^Oh, My Father/' He prays, "take it 
away." But the words scarcely escape His lips before 
His trust corrects them, "l^eivertheless, not as I will" — 
My plans, great as they are, are capable of revision into a 
profounder greatness; they verify their inmost grandeur 
just because they can be revised into something larger. 

Here, then, is the first element in our own spiritual 
mjastery. 'No matter what ptrevision, no matter what 
definite, noon-clear aims and motives reign within us, our 
life-program is capable of being infinitely revised, and, 
consequently, indefinitely enlarged by the shaping stuff of 
reality playing into us and through us. Every genuinely 
living soul experinces this truth. Prone upon the ground, 
unable to go forward or backward, above us only the un- 
feeling olives and far up the hills of space only the blazing 
stars, yet somewhere near and within are poised the twelve 
legions of God's angels — eager to be called and yet whom 
we refuse to call — ^wondering at the larger tone and chime 
we are taking on through the spiritual revisions we not 
only accept but challenge. 

Second: Revision' iglides )into and is enveloped by 
inclusion. "Nevertheless, not as I will, but as Thou wilt." 
It is the sudden leap of a soul into the vastnesses of God. 
All the lesser facts of being noiselessly vanish away through 
the conscious linking and merging of the human will with 
the Divine. If God underwent a new and real experience 
in the Incarnation, then the secret of this inreach of the 
human into the heavenlies has been made easier, more 
understandable. For God has come through all forms of 
matter and experience to meet and greet His human child 
and lead him motheringly home into the hushed and 
satisfying sanctuaries of perfect love. Our Saviour, in 
this golden readjustment of a growingly perfect Will to 
the Absolute and All-perfect, proves that life, however 



Christ's Judgmeitt of the Universe 35 

ricli, completes itself in larger and ever larger measures of 
life. "Though He was a Son," says the writer of Hebrews, 
"yet learned obedience by the things which He suffered." 
What high thought-movement, born of life itself, is here ! 
First, He "learned;" second, He was "made perfect;" 
third, "He became unto all them that obey Him the cause 
of eternal salvation." As the universe is plastic, capable 
of endless modifications, surely the Supreme Soul of the 
Universe cannot be rigid, stereotyped, mechanical. Steeple- 
jacks tell us that every well-built tower is notable for its 
capacity to sway to and fro. Trinity steeple in 'New York 
sways eighteen inches every time an electric train passes. 
St. PauFs tower is said to sway in the storm like a 
beautifully balanced cradle. When the wind blows very 
hard, the Washington Monument sways between four and 
five feet. If these structures had been built in severely 
rigid fashion and without yielding power, the wind would 
have broken them long ago. "Perhaps you don't know it," 
says an authority, "but the better a steeple is built the 
more she sways. You want to look out for the ones that 
stand rigid; there's something wrong with them — most 
likely they're out of plumb." It is even so of a soul 
threading its pilgrimage through the enchanting and be- 
wildering ways of God. We capture height after height 
of life only to learn that there are still greater heights 
beyond. 'Not by exclusion, not by negation, not by selfish- 
ness, but by going "forward a little," by falling upon the 
face, by watchings alone, by prayers unfailing but not 
unavailing — ^by these Christ-inspired attitudes of heart do 
we break through granite walls of circumstance and home 
ourselves at last in that hospitable inclusiveness which lies 
like a circle of perfection around the universe. "I^ever- 
theless" — this is life's abiding corrective^ — "not as I will" 
— ^however pure and loyal my aim — "but as Thou wilt." 
A Saviour like this can be trusted through all lives, all 
deaths, all worlds ; and the soul that trusts such a Saviour 



36 The Ii^finite Aetist and Other Seemons 

must ultimately take its place, unembarrassed and un- 
afraid, among the holiest characters and deepest in- 
telligences within the outermost ranges of being. Thus 
does it behoove us all to — 

'Severe the Maker; fetch thine eye 
Up to His style and manners of the sky. 
Not of adamant and gold 
Built He Heaven stark and cold; 
'No, but a nest of bending reeds. 
Flowering grass and scented weeds; 
Or like a traveler's fleeing tent, 
Or bow above the tempest bent; 
Built of tears and sacred flames. 
And virtue reaching to its aims; 
Built of furtherance and pursuing, 
Not of spent deeds, but of doing. 
Silent rushes the swift Lord 
Through ruined systems still restored, 
Broadsowing, bleak and void to bless. 
Plants with worlds the wilderness; 
Waters with tears of ancient sorrow 
Apples of Eden ripe to-morrow. 
House and tenant go to ground. 
Lost in God, in Godhead found." 

The third thing inevitably follows ; it is mastery ; and it 
comes with the certainty of cause and effect, being the coro- 
nation of a soul that swings triumphantly past pain and evil 
into the spiritual hinterlands. Eefusing to make terms 
with unreality and benumbing stoicism, our Master 
realized His masterfulness through trust in another and 
greater Will. Trust in God is humanity's final grandeur ; 
simple, childlike trust is the power that unfolds the best 
in the best quality of our manhood. Look at St. John. As 
the living Christ begins to dominate him, there is first his 
period of imagination. He writes the Apocalypse; he 
Wilds New Jerusalems of gold and of amethyst. Next 
dawns the era of reason when he writes his Gospel. He 



Christ's Judgment of the Univekse 37 

has foimd the Eternal E-eason, made flesh in Christ. 
Loveliest of all, he passes into the mood of childlike trust- 
fulness, even as a stormy day sometimes passes into the 
tranquil splendor of a gorgeous sunset. ^^Little children," 
— we hear him whispering the loftiest notes in the music 
of redemption — "love one another." Having made the 
rounds of creation in his climb to the snows of age, St. 
John spies out the heavenly nurseries and sweetly enters 
them through the yielding door of trust. 

Ill 

The third thing Christ found in the universe is Father- 
hood. ^'My Father!" I have purposely set this major 
truth at the end because it is really first and last — always 
and everywhere the outstanding truth of Jesus' thinking, 
doing, and dying. In our human vocabulary motherhood 
is the one term that ranks with fatherhood; but both, in 
all their heights and depths of tenderness, are embosomed 
in Christ's discovery and revelation of the Fatherhood at 
the heart of the worlds. He read it everywhere in nature. 
He saw it in sky, rain, flower, bird, animal, and human. 
Looking through the outer shell of things, Jesus found not 
a Creator merely, not a God only, but something that trans- 
figured these august names^ — He found Fatherhood, the 
wise, patient, loving, brooding, bleeding Heart, yearning 
over His myriads of childhoods throughout the whole 
creation. ^Notwithstanding the other grim things Hef 
found — ^things which refuse to be blinked and winked out 
of existence — ^the Fatherhood of God is the overarching, 
undergirding, penetrating reality that bathes universal 
being in a soft and healing splendor. "Wist ye not that I 
must be in My Father's house?" He wonderingly asked 
His parents, when they found Him in the temple. Thus 
the first recorded word of Jesus is "Father;" and the last 
word He utters while hanging between the worlds is like- 



38 The Ii^finite Artist and Other Sermons 

wise "Father." "Father," He says, "into Thy hands I 
coromend My spirit." Here, then, is the greatest thought 
upon the greatest theme. How important and inspiring to 
know what the masters think of things in which they are 
acknowledged experts! Plato's thought of philosophy, 
Shakespeare's thought of poetry, ISTewton's thought of 
gravitation, Eembrandt's thought of color, Beethoven'? 
thought of music, Liehig's thought of chemistry — how in- 
teresting to interrogate these rare minds about matters in 
which they are indisputable masters! And yet what 
infinite lengths behind Jesus are they both in the subject- 
matter of their thought and in their manifestation of 
mastery! God — the character and mind of God — ^that is 
far and away the sublimest thought within the compass of 
the human or the superhuman. Yet Jesus moves about in 
this mysterious thought-atmosphere and life^realm with 
beautiful ease and unutterable majesty — ^not a majesty 
that is cold and white and distant, but a majesty that is 
warm and winsome and motherlike. "Fact or not," says 
George Macdonald, "the existence of a God such as Christ, 
a God who is a good man infinitely, is the only idea con- 
taining hope enough for man." Why, Christ's disclosure 
of God is of more value to the progress and civilization of 
mankind than all the discoveries and inventions which have 
been or ever can be made. Eemoving the veil from the 
enshadowed face of creation, Jesus lets the Face of God 
shine through. This, I say, is the zenith of achievement 
for all known and unknown realms of intelligence. And 
here in Gethsemane our Lord and Saviour finds the Father- 
hood of God illuminating all mystery and enfolding all 
agony. ''My Father T — herein is melody for the dirge, 
sweetness for the cup of gall, strength immortal for mortal 
weakness ! 

This, my friends, is the balm for our hurt hearts and 
self -wounded souls. There is no other. All else is mirage 
and gray wastes of fiowerless regret. Here is a fount in 



Christ's Judgment of the TJniveese 39 

the desert, a green tree amid tlie waste, a garden blooming 
in tlie zones of desolation, a sun shining through the 
darkest midnight. A physician once told me this story: 
A botanist was working somewhere in the Alps. He dis- 
covered a rare plant growing from the soil deposited in the 
side of a great, rocky gorge. Desiring the plant very 
much, he was about to give up hope of possessing it, owing 
to its difficult and dangerous position. Just then he saw a 
little Swiss lad some distance away. Calling the boy to 
him, the scientist said : ^^My boy, I will give you a crown 
if you will allow me to let you down by a rope that you 
may pluck yonder plant for me." The boy thought 
seriously for a little while ; the risk was indeed great, but 
the cro'wn was worth winning. At last the boy said : "I 
will do it, if you v^ill let my father hold the rope.'' And 
he ran away to find his father. Sometimes we, too, are 
hurled over cliffs of circumstance, plunged into chasms of 
mystery, rolled in abysses of sorrow. But oh! if our 
Father — the God and Father of our blessed Saviour — 
holds the rope that ties us to Himself, we shall not only 
pluck the green things growing in austere and unlovely 
places, but we shall at last be drawn up and up to those 
dear, white heights of unbroken communion and fellow- 
ship whereon His Fatherhood makes even the night to 
shine as the day. "And we know that to them that love 
God all things work together for good, even to them that 
are called according to His purpose.'' 



IV 

THE lEOlSr GATE 

"And when they were past the first and the second guard, 
they came unto the iron gate that leadeth into the city, which 
opened to them of its own accord." — Acts xii. 10. 

This chapter recalls a passage in Ibsen's ^'Emjyeror and 
Galilean." In the name of paganism, Julian the Apostate 
fights a losing battle against the Galilean. On the night 
before his last battle Julian recalls this dream : "Where 
is He now? Has He been at work elsewhere since that 
happened at Golgotha? I dreamed of Him lately. I 
dreamed that I ordained that the memory of Him should 
be rooted out on earth. Then I soared aloft into infinite 
space till my feet rested on another world. But behold 
— ^there came a procession by me, on the strange earth 
where I stood. And in the midst of the slow moving array, 
was the Galilean, alive, and bearing a cross on His back. 
Then I called to Him and said: Whither away, Gali- 
lean?' But He turned His head toward me, smiled, 
nodded slowly, and said, ^To the Place of the Skull.' 
Where is He now ? What If He goes on and suffers, and 
dies, and conquers again and again, from world to world ?" 
Well, if there are other worlds to conquer the Galilean will 
conquer them. Before Him the Herods and the Julians 
must fall back like hideous nightmares before the sword of 
reality. He must reign in all parts of the universe. 'No 
gate of fire can shut Him out, no gate of glory can shut 
Hlim in. No present or future civilization can escape His 
glorious thraldom; no vanished epoch but must stand 
before His great and gracious judgment seat. As an 

40 



The Ikon Gate 41 

orcliestra is a mellifluous ocean of harmony, tlirougli wliicli 
wind many streams of violin, flute, and lyric melody, so 
the universe is a vast harp, quivering with many strings of 
expression. All strings respond to the Master's touch. 
Angelic majors and human minors ; natural discords and 
supernatural harmonies ; all sights, all sounds, all seasons, 
all hopes, all fears^ — all are taken by Christ and given 
righteous and euphonious interpretation. So the iron gate 
that opened as noiseless as a sunrise is an argument for the 
opening of all iron gates — somehow, sometime, somewhere. 
And Christ is the Lord of the somewhere, the sometimei, 
and the somehow. 

I 

"They came unto the iron gate." Let us make it read : 
"They and we." For we are all fellow-prisoners of Peter. 
Our iron gates are so near that we hardly need to come to 
them. Frowning, sullen, grim, they stand across life's 
roadways. They are in front of us, behind us, on every 
side. The iron gate of mystery, the iron gate of ignorance, 
the iron gate of weakness, the iron gate of affliction — ah ! 
how the rusty obstacles loom stark and terrible before us ! 
"Behold, I was shapen in iniquity, and in sin did my 
mother conceive me." It is the sob of a soul conscious at 
once of its wrongness, finiteness, and vastness. "Man, that 
is born of a woman, is of few days and full of trouble." 
It is the moan of a heart whose throbs soon beat them- 
selves out into the voiceless silences. A Brooklyn mother 
lost her son. She had two, but if she had had a thousand 
her mother-heart would not willingly have given up a 
single one. She was telling her pastor of her loss. Her 
whole soul seemed to gather in her eyes. Waving her 
hand toward the East Biver, she said: "I wouldn't give 
one kiss of my baby for all the gold in Wall Street." 
Call it hyperbole if you will, but love's exaggeration is 
Heaven's unutterable smile. 



42 The Infinite Aetist and Other Sermons 

Walt Whitman said lie saw the phantoms, rise after rise, 
bowing behind him. But our iron gates are not phantoms. 
'Nor do they bow behind us. They tower before us; they 
creak within us; they open and shut on groaning hinges. 
And sin is one of the iron gates shutting us out from 
present joy and ultimate reality. Accepted or denied, 
this is one of the unalterable facts of life. Moses made 
sin a crime against God. Plato made sin an intellectual 
affair. The Greek held that if we knew more we should 
sin less ; and if we knew all we should not sin at all. But 
history is against the philosopher, while history and expe- 
rience are with Moses. 

However, Peter did not walk up to his iron gate all 
alone. "They came unto the iron gate." The universe 
is a vast network of social forces. Every atom is tug- 
ging at his tiny atomic brother. They may be separated 
by vast distances. Yet that thrill of sympathy named 
gravitation does not allow them to be unrelated. Through 
all the veins of creation they flow toward each other. 
They exchange greetings across the gulfs of space. 
But our social universe was created and is sustained by a 
social God. This is a part of what we mean when we say 
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Because man lives in a 
social universe belonging to a social God he is federated 
in with all sweet and noble societies. Angels are his 
helpers and companions. Celestial policemen, they wing 
everywhither on errands of recovery. Most of us are too 
local, both in faith and vision, to appreciate this truth. 
We are too noisy to hear the beat of angelic wings. But 
Peter and the first Christians were almost as familiar witB 
these lightning-winged messengers of God as w^e are with 
stocks and stones. They had daily and hourly news from 
eternity. That is why they shouldered iniquity out of 
the way. We are entirely too content with news via Park 
Row. That is why we are so morally saltless and spiritu- 
ally stupid. Proud of our intellectual bombast, we are 
not penitential enough for our unchristian shabbinesses. 



The Ieon Gate 43 

ITevertlieless, God and the universe have not changed 
their front. Man is not an orphan. Angela still com- 
panion him. He may still face his iron gates with solar 
countenance. "The supreme end and purpose of this vast 
universe/' says Alfred Eussel Wallace, "was the produc- 
tion of the living soul in the perishable body of man." 
Thus the latest and the oldest are in perfect unison. God 
makes life a music of many notes, but one harmony. 
Twenty centuries before Wallace, Paul said, "All things 
work together for good to them that love God." Before 
Paul, Plato wrote: "Let me tell you, then, why the 
Creator created and made the universe. He was good, 
and desired that all things should be as like Himself as 
possible." But the Greek, the. apostle, and the scientist 
are all anticipated by Genesis: "And God saw everything 
that He had made, and, behold, it was very good." Still 
the eternal goodness is not yet exhausted. Building his 
house upon the edge of the grave, man soon gives his body 
to the dust and yields his spirit back to God. Something 
more definite and oracular was needed. Surpassing the 
ministry of angels, God now slips into humanity's hand 
the key that opens all iron gates: "And the Word be- 
came flesh and dwelt among us (and we beheld His glory, 
glory as of the only begotten from the Father), full of 
grace and truth." So did God enrobe Himself in our hu- 
manity and wear it up the gold-throned hills of light. 

II 

Coming unto the iron gate — ^what then? Why, the 
city: "They came unto the iron gate that leadeth into 
the city." Man's far-flung goal is a holy city. We love 
the country — its green of spring, its harvests of summer, 
its gold of autumn, its white of winter. There is an es- 
sential inter-relatedness between the city and the country. 
They are not rivals in the Divine economies. They are 
complementary, each fulfilling the other. Yet the big 



44 The Infinite Aetist and Other Sermons 

problems of liiiinanity, tlie vast l^enevolences, the generic 
evils, tlie ancient desolations, the inspiring heroisms, the 
untold want and the indescribable luxury, the heavens and 
hells of humanity, center in the motley aggregations of 
the city. More's Utopia, Bacon's 'New Atlantis, Campa- 
nella's City of the Sun, Harrington's Oceana — all the 
ideal commonwealths have the qualities of ideal cities. 
Man's dream is the reflex of God's purpose. The seer be- 
held the JSTew Jerusalem coming down out of Heaven from 
God. But man is to take the holy city of a redeemed 
personality back to God. This is time's superior wonder. 
The capital of the universe is a city of transfigured per- 
sonalities. The foundations of the one are adorned with 
all manner of precious stones ; the foundations of the other 
are a living mosaic of Christ-like principles. The first 
foundation is the jasper of truth; the second the sapphire 
of faith ; the third the chalcedony of hope ; the fourth, the 
emerald of love; the fifth, the sardonyx of vision: the 
sixth, the sardius of compassion; the seventh, the chrys- 
olite of kindness; the eighth, the beryl of long-suffering; 
the ninth, the topaz of meekness ; the tenth, the chrysopraso 
of patience; the eleventh, the jacinth of beauty; the 
twelfth, the amethyst of goodness. The gates are the 
twelve pearls of a Christianized will. And the street of 
this holy human city is the pure gold of godlike purpose, 
transparent as glass. 

More wonderful, then, than the city into which Peter 
and the angel went, were the spiritual cities they carried 
within them. Go out into your own city with its teem- 
ing millions. Humanity looks very cheap while real estate 
is exceeding dear. Mark well your great buildings, your 
subways, your parks, your boulevards, your docks, your 
railways. !N'ow go to the dingiest den and listen to the 
cry of the poorest, weakest little child in all this seething 
mass of humanity. That child is of more value in God's 
sight than every skyscraper, every banking institution, 



The Ieon Gate 45 

every art gallery, every churcli building, every education- 
al center on these two islands. "Oh," but you say, "that 
is an outburst of humanitarian sentiment, and an unwar- 
ranted exaggeration. I know the value of a single soul, 

but " Ah! but, my friend, if the Incarnation be not 

a misnomer, if Calvary be not a piece of make-believe, 
if Easter morning be not a delusion, if Olivet be not a mas- 
querade, then this is the sober truth. A single human 
being, bearing the image of its God, is of more value than 
many solar systems. We may not believe this, but God 
does ; and that is why we have the Christian evangel. We 
must read humanity and the universe in the light of 
Christ, and not Christ in the light of humanity and the 
universe. If man cannot profit by gaining the world and 
losing his soul, much less shall we reach the goal of being 
by gaining a perfectly human and a perfectly inadequate 
philosophy and losing the only solution we have of life's 
final values. 

Ill 

In describing Peter's angel-aided break for liberty, the 
historian is careful of details. Telling us the nature 
of the gate and what it led to, he does not forget to tell 
us how it opened. "Which opened to them of its own ac- 
cord." Nolan Rice Best has an illuminating book 
on "Beyond the Natural Order." The New Testa- 
ment is full of events plainly due to causes that lie 
beyond the natural order as we know it. As events, 
they belong to history. They cannot be ignored. They 
cannot be explained away. They are properly "signs" 
— signals that the Active Engineer is out in the track- 
ways of His universe. As to the how, the wherefore, 
and the reasons of such events they belong also to 
the region of faith. The justification of a miracle, in 
Christ's view, was a moral demand. Once the demand 
asserts itself, the answer is a "sign" that God is living, 



46 The Iistfinite Artist aitd Other Sermons 

powerful, good. The late l^ewton Clarke — one of the 
noblest theologians of the last twenty-five years — ^has left 
this definition of God: "God is the Personal Spirit, per- 
fectly good. Who in holy love creates, sustains and orders 
all." Following his own analysis, we have: The nature 
of God : He is a Personal Spirit. The character of God : 
He is perfectly good. The relation of God to all other 
existence : He creates, sustains, and orders all. The 
motive of God in His relation to all other existence : His 
motive is holy love, l^ow, after reading this definition 
and its exposition, taken in conjunction with the facts 
of the 'New Testament, the life and work of Christ, "there 
is nothing,'' according to Lord Kelvin, "between absolute 
scientific belief in a Creative power and the acceptance 
of the theory of a fortuitous concourse of atoms. If you 
think strongly enough, you will be forced by science to the 
belief in God, which is the foundation of all religion.'' 
I have thus blended the theologian's definition and the 
scientist's statement for this reason: They both agree 
that the Vital Cause is equal to any demand, and all the 
more so if a moral reason lies behind it. 

The question, then, is this: Was there a moral reason 
for the opening of that iron gate ? ISTot, mark you, did it 
open, or refuse to open, so as to fit in with your theory or 
mine ; but was there a sufiicient cause for its being opened ? 
If so, then "The Silent Opener of the Gate" may open it 
without asking the permission of that uneasy ghost called 
the modern mind. Surely, the reason is ample enough. 
The life of one of the pillars of the Christian Church is 
at stake. That , Church is in the critical period of its 
infancy. It is utterly incapable of caring for itself. An 
infant crying in one of the darkest nights of history, it 
has no language but a cry. A brutal king is bent on aiding 
the foes of that Church. Plainly, nothing short of an 
extraordinary intervention can save the apostle's life. 
These are at least some of the facts in the situation. IsTow, 
if there is a God, and if He has revealed Himself in Christ, 



The Iron Gate 47 

how can He avoid interfering? God is the most deeply 
obligated Being in the universe. How shall God escape 
His duty ? He may not do it as we think He ought. But 
the Judge of all the earth must do right just because He 
is the Judge of all the earth, of the whole universe, and 
not a segment of it. 

Knit in with the moral reason is the question of pos- 
sibility. ^ What about the reign of law ?" you ask. Behind 
that question is another: Did God create the universe, 
and then become its victim? Some millions of aeons be- 
fore the reign of law had become a phrase, the universe 
was a fact. The reign of law is just a theoretical jailer 
which makes God an emaciated prisoner of the universe. 
But the August Prisoner has invariably refused to stay 
locked upi. In a sense, the reign of law is a figment of 
the unilluminated imagination. "The intellect," says 
Bergson "is characterized by a natural inability to under- 
stand life." And we live in a living universe, the universe 
is the garment of the living God, and God transcends His 
garment as the mind transcends the brain in which it 
is housed. Bolts and bars are simply composed of mole- 
cules, then atoms, then electrons, then ether whirls. The 
mother-substance of the worlds, the primeval material from 
which the solar system has come, is of a texture like that 
of clouds, a kind of vapor. Is it possible that God can 
originate ether whirls, out of which all nebulae and all sys- 
tems are born, and yet cannot make an iron gate open of 
its own accord ? Yerily, it requires more faith to believe 
such a propiosition than it does tO' believe in the opening 
of many iron gates. The 'New Testament would save 
the modern mind from becoming the piaralyzed victim of 
a syllogism. 

IV 

But I am not trying to justify miracles. They do not 
need it. I am trying to justify myself, first, in the light 
of the facts of the Christian revelation, and, second, in 



48 The Ii^fii^ite Artist aw^d Other Sermons 

tlie light of science. The man who says he cannot believe 
in miracles because of scientific discovery needs to read 
more science. If a little science has predisposed him 
to unbelief, much science will compel him, as Kelvin says, 
to faith as the only possible alternative for an honest mind. 
Do you think the opening of an iron gate is wonderful? 
Then what will you say to the birth of worlds, in the womb 
of space, going on now before the astronomer's eyes? 
Coming nearer home, here is a time-piece. It consists 
of two leaves of aluminum, an exhausted glass tube and 
a fraction of a grain of radium. Once every minute the 
radioactivity of the radium causes the aluminum leaves 
to move. By means of a wireless coherer, a bell rings at 
each movement of the leaves. 'Now the wonderful energy 
inherent in that microscopic piece of radium, it is be- 
lieved, will continue to act for ten thousand years. In 
other words, that bell will ring every minute for the next 
hundred centuries. Think, again, of the boundless ener- 
gies locked up in the ether. The density of ether is a mil- 
lion million times that of water. The estimated force be- 
tween the earth and sun is four trillion tons weight. What 
enormous strength in the ether to bear the weight of suns 
and planets! Yet Lodge says that one cubic millimeter 
of free ether contains enough energy to run a million- 
horse-power station, working uninterruptedly for forty mil- 
lion years. 

Why according to this scientist, a microscopic speck of 
ether could have kidnaped Herod, his army and the Roman 
Empire ! Take a biological illustration. Conditions being 
favorable, we know that life reproduces itself on an in- 
calculable scale. Here is a single bacterium. It is so 
small a bit of protoplasm that if 1,500 bacteria were ar- 
ranged in a procession end to end they would not reach 
across the head of a pin. Suppose you take a solitary 
bacterium at high noon to-day. By 1 o'clock the single 
cell will have become two. By 2 o'clock there will be two 
granddaughter cells, thus totaling a community of four 



The Ieon Gate 49 

cells. But within twenty-four hours, starting from that 
lone bacterium, there will he 16,776,216 bacteria. Pru- 
dens calculates that if that single creature were to go on 
multiplying itself, within -Oyq days its mass would com- 
pletely fill as much space as is occupied by all the oceans 
on earth, provided they are only a mile in average depth. 
^N'ext to the 'New Testament, then, the strongest argu- 
ments for the supernatural are found in modern mechanics, 
biology, chemistry, electrophysics, and astronomy. What 
John Burroughs calls the new vitalism is the old life which 
was in the beginning, ^'that which we have seen with our 
eyes, that which we beheld and our hands handled, concern- 
ing the Word of Life." Buskin was not far astray. He 
said that much of our modern education enables people to 
think wrongly on every subject of importance. After all, 
brightening the cosmic emotion is a sorry substitute for 
personal trust in the Christian God. The optimism which 
thoughtlessly hurrahs for the universe, ignoring the keenly, 
distinctly moral and spiritual majesties, is as evanescent as 
dawn-mist before the hot breath of the sun. It lacks teeth, 
it does not bite into the substance of things. There is no 
excuse for the modern mind journeying through the wil- 
derness of Hume and Haeckel. Even the depraved edu- 
cational tastes, for which Buskin condemns us, should not 
permanently doom us to garlic and flesh-pots, when the 
Tree of Life bends its luscious fruit right across our path- 
way. The desert is fleeing before a garden; the canker- 
worm is consumed by the bird of paradise; the serpent's 
head is bruised by the woman's heel ; the reign of law has 
lost its grip on the living God. A hypothesis is good, but 
life is better. Beason never intended that reality should 
be the slave of a theory. We know that the invisible Gate- 
keeper opens all gates. It matters not whether they be 
iron, or pearl, or silver, or gold. They open of their own 
accord just to announce the presence and freedom of 
the Keeper. If the spectrograph reveals the gold in the 
sun, the copper in Mars, the iron on the moons of Jupiter, 



50 The In^finite Artist an^d Other Sermons 

tlie "faithograpli" of the Christian reveals the nearness, 
the helpfulness., and the freedom of Almighty God. Peter's 
iron gate was opened in answer to prayer. That is in- 
tensely interesting in itself, both as a fact and a specula- 
tion. 'Not less interesting is this truth: Your own iron 
gates will yield to the same power. 



Consider, finally, Peter's own self-discovery. ''When 
Peter was come to himself, he said, ITow I know of a truth 
that the Lord hath sent forth His angel and delivered me." 
Discovering his own soul, man needs to make no other 
discovery. He enters a realm whose spiritual scenery is 
visited by God and looked at by angels. ''Only one thing 
matters,'' said Novalis, "and that is the search for our 
transcendental self." But more important than the search 
is the soul's self-discovery in Christ. Herein our faith 
excels. Philosophy is ever out on the march, but never 
reaches camp. Psychology is ever taking new soundings, 
but never fathoms the mystery. Science is ever' assembling 
facts, but the supreme fact strangely escapes.. The soul 
in Christ Jesus marches and fathoms and assembles, but it 
also finds, like Peter, it comes to itself, tO' the God-self, and, 
in due time, it will come to all other noble selves in the 
universe. Maeterlinck's confession is true: "We live so 
far from ourselves that we are ignorant of nearly every- 
thing that occurs at the horizon of our being." But Christ 
creates the homing self. When the prodigal came to him- 
seK, the journey to the rather's house was less than a 
hand-breadth, while the journey to the Father Himself 
was nearer than a heart-throb. A friend tells me of re- 
cently seeing a complete rainbow down at Panama. We 
usually see the many-colored arch in this atmosphere, but 
never a pot of gold at either foot of the iridescent splen- 
dor. In the crystal atmosphere of revelation the soul's 



The Iron Gate 61 

rainbow is clearly visible. It begins in God and it ends in 
God. l^ewton first sbowed that every single ray of sun- 
light contains all the colors of the rainbow — ^violet, indigo, 
blue, green, yellow, orange, red. For thousands of years 
sunbeams smote the human eye. But until God said, 
"Let IN^ewton be," no one suspected that each beam held 
all the primary colors. For thousands of years, also, 
men had pondered and dreamed and wondered over that 
ray of divinity called the soul. But until Christ unveiled 
Godhead in the flesh, no adequate valuation of man had 
been made. Carlyle said : "There are depths in man that 
go the length of lowest hell." It is grimly true, and so 
we have the Incarnation. Throwing open the gates of new 
life to every soul, Christ says: "There are heights in man 
that go the length of highest Heaven. I am here to help 
you reach the peaks, O man. Trust Me. Follow Me. So 
will you come to yourself, and at last enter the golden man- 
sions of eternity." Down at Bell Buckle, Tennessee, I 
heard a mocking-bird and a cardinal singing. It was such a 
duet as the Southland is famous for. The mocking-bird — 
that myriad-voiced Shakespeare of the twigs. — sang his 
own song and the cardinal's, too. According to conven- 
tional platitudes, the cardinal should have kept quiet, and 
let his lyrically-gifted brother make all the music. But 
not so. Every time the mocker mocked him the blood-red 
warbler sang his song twice over and twice louder than be- 
fore. When a man comes to himself, he sings his own 
song of redemption. The fact that we are here proves that 
God has need of just such persons as we are. Shall we 
not let the Master play upon the keys of our being ? He 
makes the worlds melodious; He makes life intelligible; 
He makes the soul august; He makes work divine; He 
makes pain sacramental; He makes death a home^going. 
Coming to ourselves in Christ, we come to all that was, 
and isi, and shall be. 



THE SUPEEME OEIGIl^ALITY 

"The hour cometli, and now is, when the true worshipers 
shall worship the Father in spirit and truth." — St. John iv. 23. 

When Jesus talked with the woman of Samaria, He 
touched the earth with a beauty that can never fade. In 
that noonday hour He left certain marks in the human con- 
sciousness too deep to be utterly obliterated. Oh, the 
humanness, the beauty, the dignity, the wonder of it all ! 
He talked to that bedraggled soul as if she were a queen. 
Life had left her cold and soiled and cynical; Jesus left 
her as sweet as an opening bud on the rosebush of a heaven- 
ly chastity. Call Him what you will — Lord, Master, 
Teacher, Saviour, God in the flesh, Messiah of the nations 
— ^no matter ! What's in a name — especially when the Eter- 
nal is in a man, and in this Man in such bewildering 
heights and lengths and depths and breadths ?' If He is not 
verily the King of Kings in human form, I know that He 
talked and acted as I should like to have the King of the 
Universe talk and act if He ever comes this way. !N'umer- 
ically speaking, our Lord did not have much of an audience 
that day — only one — ^not a large and interesting audience 
such as I have. This woman was no philosopher, no scien- 
tist, no reformer, no poet, no Helen of Troy to set armies 
and ages in motion. 'No — she was just a nonentity, accord- 
ing to the world's coarse rule of thumb. But, mark you 
well, no grove, no academy, no temple, no Sarbonne ever 
listened to such words as fell upon her ears. I don't know 
how they sounded to her, for she was just a dull human 
clod unquickened as yet by the lyric ecstasy of a soul in 

52 



The Supreme Obiginality 53 

full tune; but I think a wise-listening Plato might have 
fashioned these words into a new philosophy, wandering 
up and down Platoland with more than a Greek stride, 
with more than a Hellenic glow upon his brow, telling 
everybody he met that the dark side of the universe had 
goldenly swung into shimmering oceans of light. 

And yet perhaps one should not make too much ado 
about the Master's small audience. For did He not know 
that the universe is so keyed to the rhythms of truth that 
all succeeding ages would hear the words He spoke that 
sultry noonday, wearied as He was by the wellside ? Hear 
Him speak of His Father: "God is a Spirit." How 
could a saying like that ever get lost ? It might wander on 
unheeded to the end of time and space, but somehow it 
would always come winging home and build its soft nest 
in the human consciousness. Hear Him confess His Mes- 
siahship: "I that speak unto thee am He." Is it not 
like the dawn confessing its splendor to a wilted flower? 
Hear Him define the only worship Heaven knows any- 
thing of: "The hour cometh, and now is, when the true 
worshipers shall worship the Father in spirit and re- 
ality." It is all so simple, so grand, so original, that, be- 
holding its beauty, we are at first smitten with awe and 
ultimately threatened with blindness. 

Here, indeed, is a new epoch in the history of origi- 
nality; and by originality I mean that which is absolute, 
supreme, the human soul played upon by the Soul of God, 
the breath of the Eternal in quickened and quiveringly 
responsive mortals, a mind consciously receiving Eternal 
Goods and packing them up in its own storehouse of im- 
mortality. I grant you that we do not make much of this 
quality of originality nowadays. We are keen on the 
penny-a-liners, or the loud-mouthed politician, or the 
brilliant talker who puts us snugly and intellectually to 
sleep, though we wake to find ourselves not famous but 
bigger fools than ever. Or perchance we stop with the 



64 The Infinite Aetist and Other Seemons 

dictionary's definition of originality — the quality of being 
first hand, primal, initial, or tlie quality of being fresh, 
novel, new, or, higher still, the quality of producing new 
thoughts or unusual combinations of thought. All of 
which is well and good, yet markedly wanting in the origi- 
nality which is supreme. When Jesus announced that the 
hour had already come that true worshipers must wor- 
ship the Father in spirit and truth, while Hb by no means 
condemned the walls of the world's temples and cathedrals. 
He did widen them until their foundations and pillars 
were made to rest upon the bedrock of Eternity itself. For 
in that hour the universe responded with a great ^^ Amen !" 
and the roots of the human soul were thrust more deeply 
into the fertilizing soils of Good. Therefore, I say the 
supreme originality is not in the dictionary, nor the pic- 
ture, nor the statue, nor the temple; these may be utter- 
ances, adumbrations, broken lights of it; yet the thing it- 
self is in life, in the soul, in the actions and reactions of 
the Holy Spirit to, in, upon, and through the human, the 
authentic and Divine Fire burning and glowing upon the 
purified altars of the heart. 



Let us apply this kind of originality to worship. Now 
worship is the attempt of the human tO' measure the Divine 
worth ; it is an expression of the soul's love or thought or 
desire of God. In true worship man simply capitalizes his 
conception of the Best, the Highest, the Absolute. Of 
course the history of man shows that worship is surrounded 
by crudeness, ignorance, and superstition. Only a long, 
slow evolutionary process has brought us to our Christian 
point of vantage. The backward peoples of to-day — ^the 
benighted little children of the Infinite Goodness^ — are 
now in the stage where our own distant ancestors once 
were; and in worshiping the sun, fire, and natural forces 



The Supeeme Originality 55 

they are paying tribute to that which they regard as of 
the highest worth. 

Now Jesus takes this idea of worship and holds it up 
in the white light shining through His Soul. Listening 
to Him, we feel that Jesus, without altogether ignoring 
place or form, sets forth the reality as something glorious, 
immense, transcendent, too vast for rite or cathedral ; it is 
that mood in which the supernal afflatus catches the soul 
and wings it adoringly into the presence of God while walls 
and worlds vanish away. I count this deed of your soul 
a deed of supreme originality. Through it you break 
bounds, you escape from the besetting molds of matter into 
the hallowing homes of Mind and Heart when you worship 
the Father in spirit and truth. Are you in the wilderness ? 
Even the gray-stretching wastes become gardenesque, 
greenly inviting, instinct with presences and whisperings. 
Are you in the crowded city thoroughfare ? Lo ! these miles 
of steel and stone — as James Thomson assures us William 
Blake found them — ^with their echoing throb of deathless 
souls, are hued with beauty and indefinable meaning. Are 
you in the chapel, the synagogue, the church, the cathe- 
dral ? Why, the very places are mysteriously aware ; you 
have split the seen and material wide open and passed 
into the society and fellowship of God. "Ah!" but you 
say, "I would prove my originality by writing a book, or 
composing an oratorio, or building a railroad, or producing 
an invention, or founding a commercial establishment." 
Very well; do these things; but why should you forget 
to do this greater thing ? Why should you not also prove 
your soul and your God by this act of original spiritual 
research and firsthand estimate of the Absolute Worth? 
Then indeed do all other worths, all other companionships, 
seem tame and inconsequential, or else they are shot 
through with a significance they never knew. Worship, 
then, is the process whereby the soul of man continually 
awakens himself into the likeness of God and is abundantly 



56 The Infinite Aetist and Other Sermons 

satisfied. Thus do all the dear intimacies and commun- 
ions in and through nature and all high human fellow- 
ships but hand us onward, upward, and inward until we 
dwell in God even as we pilgrim through earth and the 
years. Because — science and song alike declare it^ — 

"All things by immortal power 
Near or far, 
Hiddenly, 

To each other linked are, 
That thou canst not stir a flower 
Without troubling of a star." 

Worship sandals our spiritual feet with that holy white- 
ness which enables us to walk in behind the hidden proc- 
esses of power, past waving flowers and glowing stars, until 
we kneel worshipfully in that Presence from Whom con- 
stellations glimmeringly flee away. '^Oh, worship the 
Lord in the beauty of holiness,'' is then our sacerdotal 
chant. "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts: the whole 
earth is full of His glory." 

II 

A further aspect of supreme originality is seen in pray- 
ing. In piraying, I say, rather than prayer, because prayer 
may be a peg upon which to hang the phrasing or manner 
or theory of the fact. While these certainly cannot be 
disregarded, they must not be permitted to dull the edge 
of the reality. When the Master was in Jerusalem He 
saw play-actors upon the corners of the streets engaged 
with the externals of prayer ; He also beheld the mechanics 
of prayer in full operation in the synagogues. All the 
nectar had been conventionally drained from this chalice 
of beauty; the elixir of its inspiration had been spilled 
and the dry dust of formalism had sucked it down. ''When 
you pray,'' said Jesus, — ^Who carried a telescope for one 
eye and a microscope for the other, always perceiving the 



The Supreme Originality 57 

infinitely large and the infinitely small, — "go into your 
room and shut the door, pray to your Father Who is in 
secret, and your Father Who sees what is secret will reward 
you. Do not piray by idle rote like pagans, for they sup- 
pose they will be heard the more they say; you must not 
copy them ; your Father knows your needs before you ask 
Him." "Then," you rejoin, "if God knows my needs be- 
fore I pray, what's the need of praying?" Among other 
things, this in particular: Praying renders you capable 
of receiving; praying does not so much change God's WiU 
as it changes your will. Prayer is the channel — and every 
man digs his own pirayer-channel — through which the 
streams of God's purpose flow into and through you. Pray- 
ing invests us with the power of becoming spiritually cre- 
ative. Through prayer we bring to naught the gray old 
iniquities hiding away in the dungeons of our being; 
through prayer we summon the angels of our better nature 
into full-chorded minstrelsy. Do you not recall those 
unforgettable words of Coleridge about music ? "The silent 
air," he sings, "is Music slumbering on her instrument." 
Yes, the air is silent, and Music is there, but slumbering — 
asleep. But hearken! the musician comes with his tuned 
wires, and he sweetly and tunefully awakens the silent 
air to music — ^music always and everywhere sleeping in 
the silent air. Likewise does praying awaken the powers, 
the ideals, the visions, the victories, the hopes, the loves 
slumbering in the soul. What a neglected power is prayer 
— humanity's mightiest unused force! Civilization sinks 
into gilded barbarism without the undergirding power of 
this transfiguring personal energy. After a service in 
Central Church, a friend related this incident: A gentle- 
man here in Chicago found himself going to pieces be- 
cause of wrongness in the great business concern of which 
he was a part. The situation seemed irremediable ; things 
had gotten beyond his control, and, apparently, beyond 
anybody's control. Driven almost to despair, this man 



58 The Infin^ite Aetist ai^d Other Seemoits 

went to his room, slmt himself in, and prayed — prayed for 
the helpi of God. He got it, and he got it forthwith. Im- 
mediately his chaos in business was strangely touched into 
concord. Are not most of us made to marvel at these 
spiritual facts and forces? And why? Because we are 
strangers to them, though they are the abiding home- 
makers in the fatherlands and soul-stuff of life itself. Oh, 
why will we resort to every method but the right method ?' 
Why tap every source but the true source? Why are we 
frantically sewing patches upon the rotten cloth of civiliza- 
tion when nothing short of a new soul can save civilization 
from tearing itself in pieces ? And that new soul comes not 
through new science, new art, new philosophy, or new 
learning; it comes only as original, Christ-wrought wills, 
working together throughout the whole earth and bent on 
doing justice and mercy, achievingly align themselves with 
God through praying — ^which is at the base of any and all 
practicing worth the name. 

Ill 

Moreover, think of the originality manifested in willing. 
!N'o Edwardsean treatise on the will is necessary to con- 
vince a thoughtful mind that the human will ranks among 
the sublimest creations of the Divine almightiness and wis- 
dom. We say that the will is the faculty of conscious, 
deliberate action. Do we know what a tremendous say- 
ing that is ? Why, it instantly challenges us to reflect upon 
all the modifications of the earth wrought by man. While 
it is not wholly true to assert that the earth has no mean- 
ing apart from man, there is nevertheless an undeniable 
truth within it. The earth must have had a meaning for 
God a million ages before man was born, because our 
planet was originally packed with thoughts and purposes 
ultimating in its noblest creature. Yet with the coming 
of the human earth entered upon a career hitherto un- 



The Supreme Obighitality 69 

known and impossible. If the power wliicli wells up in 
nature as energy is the selfsame which wells up in man 
as consciousness, then man is indeed the center of a very 
great transforming Intelligence. Working with that In- 
telligence, what monumental deeds have been wrought by 
the human will! Suppose the Mind manifested in the 
will of humanity should suddenly stop. Beginning with 
Chicago, we should soon have a city of the dead. 'No face 
would appear on the streets; no thunder of energy would 
be heard in mart and market; no door would open or 
shut — every home would be haunted by an oppressive 
silence. Now suppose, also, that this sheer negation of the 
individual and collective human will should be continued 
and extended. In terms of years our streets and boule^- 
vards would be a grass-grown, briar-possessed, vermin- 
infested, spider-hung, animal-prowling jungle. I^ow 
broaden the picture until it involves the whole earth. What 
a world this would be bereft of the activities of the human 
will! No civilization, no government, no business, no 
home, no church — ^nothing! Would it not be a darkened, 
dehumanized globe over which Venders Lucifer and Mil- 
ton's Satan would rejoice with hate unspeakable and full 
of deviltry ? But lo ! the human will is here and at work. 
It sees the dawn and the sunset and imprisons them in 
colors. It turns "the silent air" into symphonies. It bids 
the forest to remove and commands the city to come. It 
says to the stars : "How much do you weigh ? You don't 
know ? I will tell you." It says to stones : "Be statues." 
It says to forests: "Be houses and homes." It says to 
ores and metals: "Be railroads and skyscrapers and 
ocean palaces." Wonderful are these outflashings and 
f orthputtings of will ! Wonderful — yes, but not the most 
wonderful. Man's supreme originality manifests itself 
in a yet nobler and grander fashion. He wills to do the Will 
of God, and hnows -firsthand the Mind aoid Heart of the 
world, "Then shall ye know," says a prophet, "if ye fol- 



60 The Ii^fii^ite Artist aistd Other Sermo]S"s 

low on to know the Lord." "If any man willeth to do 
His will/' says the Master, "he shall know of the teach- 
ing, whether it is from God, or whether I speak from My- 
self." Here, surely, is a vast ocean of originality waiting 
for throhhing ships of reality to sail forth from ports of 
faith. Oh, brothers, that sea is calling us — calling us 
now. Shall we not arise and go down into this great sea 
with our wonder-wrought ships ? Its waves are refreshing, 
its winds are cleansing, its paths are glowing, its harbors 
are alluring. Lowell regarded Carlyle as the profoundest of 
critics and possessed of the most dramatic imagination of 
modern times. Yet Lowell thought Carlyle incapable of 
writing history in the true sense, because he looked on 
mankind "as a herd without volition and without moral 
force." Mankind without volition! Mankind without 
moral force! Why, mankind has enough volition and 
moral force to change the disposition of the world in ^Ye 
minutes! "Bring ye the whole tithe into the storehouse, 
that there may be meat in Mine house, and prove Me now 
herewith, saith the Lord of hosts, if I will not open you the 
windows of heaven, and pour you out a blessing that there 
shall not be room enough to receive it." What a generous 
God! Why, the whole tithe is only a tenth. If a tenth 
of our substance, a tenth of our time, a tenth of our thought 
can move that Hand which opens the heavenly windows 
so widely — ^what, think you, would happen if we gave not 
a puny tenth but our all in cooperation with that Power 
not ourselves that makes for righteousness? Verily, be- 
tween the fading twilight of mom and the growing twilight 
of even the world would be imparadised. Such transfig- 
uring dews of grace, such copious showers of goodness, such 
quickening rains of the Holy Ghost would fall upon us 
that our waste places would be overrun by the fruits of 
righteousness and our desolations would break into sing- 
ing before the Lord. And behold! everybody can have 
a Siare in this work. Yet nobody can do the work of any- 



The Supreme Originality 61 

body else; every soul must do its own work to realize its 
own soulhood; but in the doing of that work what first- 
handedness, what unique originality ! It is intimate, soul- 
deep handling of the very stuffs of life itself — and life as 
manifested in spiritual intelligence and hope and faith and 
love. Hugo has a story of M. de las Casas and ^N'apoleon 
at St. Helena. ^^Sire/' said the former, "had I been like 
you, master of Prussia, I sHould have taken the sword of 
Frederick the Great from the tomb at Potsdam, and I 
should have worn it.'' "Fool," exclaimed ISTapoleon, "I 
had my own." I^obody can handle that mysterious sword 
sheathed in your will but you — you only. But oh, what 
flashes of beauty and destiny you may cut with that sword 
into your own being, yea, into the mother-substance of the 
worlds. "Woman," says one of Shakespeare's characters, 
"thou art the cruelest she alive, if thou wilt lead these 
graces to the grave and leave the world no copy." How 
much more cruel, then, to own the spiritually creative pow- 
er lodged in your will and leave the world no copy of those 
divinely beautiful soul-children which you and you alone 
can generate. "When the man," says the seer, "listening 
to his conscience, wills and does the right, irrespective of 
inclination as of consequence, then is the man free, the uni- 
verse open before him." Thus is the Bible itself, as well 
as every godly life that has silvered the shadows of history, 
a monumental witness unto the originality which is su- 
preme. 

lY 

A further phase of paramount originality is^ realized 
by serving. Here, as always, the Master's thought towers 
up in unique and winsome grandeur. He best of all pene- 
trates the husk and lays bare the kernel of truth. What 
would one not give to see God, the heavens and the earth, 
angels and men, for one transfiguring moment through the 
eyes of Christ ? Well, does He not lend mortals Hlis eyes ? 



62 The Infiistite Aetist and Other Sermon's 

May we not see, for a little, in His light? This, surely, 
is one of the -uncommon commonplaces of our religion — ^the 
illuminating insight and moral radiance shed into us by 
His Holy Spirit. And along with the Divine Fatherhood 
and the unceasing passion of redemption we shall have a 
growing appreciation of what Christian serving means, 
and how it fashions us into the molds of an originality not 
otherwise experienced by men. Christ's teaching here is 
augustly simple; false standards and disloyal living alone 
make us dead to its rapture. All systems and beings. He 
teaches, are in every way bound together by the laws of 
service. God is the Infinite Servant. ^^My Father work- 
eth even until now." God could not be God and escape the 
law. "I am among you as he that serveth." Thus does the 
Master honor and illustrate the law in Himself. Yet it is 
when he thinks of humanity — of what the human comes 
to as the result of obeying the law — ^that our minds and 
imaginations are in danger of bewilderment. The teach- 
ing on this subject, wide and various as it is, may be 
summed up under two heads. First, there is the service 
rendered from a selfish motive. It reeks with pharisaic self- 
applause and smells of pharisaic insincerity. It earns its 
own reward and invariably receives it. It is on this score 
that some tremendous surprises are to be witnessed in the 
completed drama of history. ^There are last who shall 
be first, and there are first who shall be last." Standing 
forth in the full blaze of the sun of reality, many historic 
giants will instantaneously shrink to the dimensions of 
pygmies, because their colossal wheels of energy were driv- 
en by the black streams of selfishness. Investing the pre- 
cious capital of life itself in gaining the world they were 
foredoomed to lose both, inasmuch as the world without 
life is valueless while life actuated by worldliness is an 
irremediable curse. Cleverness, brilliance, efficiency, and 
genius are all desirable, but upon this condition — ^that their 
possessors recognize the Giver of all good and honor Him 



The Supreme Obiginality 63 

in the exercise of their endowments. Otherwise, our earth- 
ly halls of fame will resemble shacks in the Great Assize. 
ITevertheless, is it not pathetic when we consider the price 
many are eager to pay for a niche in the Temple of 
Earthly Incise ?' They must have the noise, even though it 
makes them deaf to the overtures of reality. They reach 
the point when the worst conceivable hell to them is ob- 
scurity, lack of notoriety. What is this but the tragic 
return of selfishness upon itself? Failing to fit in with 
the designs of God, this self-idolatry is finally shed by 
the universe as a serpent sheds its skin. It is cast aside as 
a dry, wrinkled, dead thing, having no place about the soul 
of great and worthful being, quite unaware of the "impas- 
sioned quietude" which pierfumes the heart of all abiding 
loveliness. 

On the other hand, unselfish service — service that aims 
distinctly at the honor of God and the welfare of man, 
holds over and on after all meretricious and melodramatic 
performances have vanished. "The humble men of heart 
alone can believe in the high," says George Macdonald, 
"they alone can perceive, they alone can embrace grandeur. 
Humility is essential to greatness, the inside of grandeur." 
And it is in the doing of the humble tasks that the soul 
of man secretes the originality which is superior. We 
do the things that the world may see, and we have our re^ 
ward — ^the applause of the world and a meaner soul; we 
do the little things as unto God and His children, and lo ! 
the hidden shrines of our being become melodious with the 
harmonies whence the spheres borrow their music. When 
history shall have been finished, these are the questions 
which remain unto eternity: Did you feed the hungry? 
Did you give drink to the thirsty ? Did you show hospi- 
tality to the stranger ? Did you clothe the naked ? Did 
you visit the sick? Did you go unto the prisoner? We 
shall have to answer these questions in our final examina- 
tion ; they bulk larger than all others. Fortunate are WQ 



64 The Infinite Aetist and Other Sermons 

if we can solve problems in the higher mathematics, dis- 
course upon the marvel of electrons and universes in the 
making, point out the beauties of nature and of art, and 
describe the national genius of the races between the Sev- 
en Seas. Yet being expert in these questions alone can- 
not pass us in the Day toward which all days and years and 
ages converge. For then it is our attitude toward God 
and Man that counts; then the hearsay, theoretical view- 
point will avail us not. We rest finally in the scale of cre- 
ation we have wrought out for ourselves, each one going 
to his own place. The highest grades of being are achieved 
and occupied by those whose lives have been devoted to the 
highest subjects and services, which are God and Man and 
Love and Duty. Consequently the reversal of our earthly 
and historic judgments will be one of the outstanding 
facts of that Judgment from which there is no appeal. 
While no good can or will be lost out of the world or the 
universe, the overlooked and undervalued good will have 
its way at last, coming untrumpeted and unsung to its 
coronation as majestically as the sun unbars the gates of 
morn. What if a crust with love should prove sweeter 
than a feast with the gods ? What if a cup of cold water, 
given in the name of Christ, should be more refreshing 
than seas of nectar ? What if clothing stitched by fingers 
of lovingkindness should outshine robes of splendor and 
stars of flame ? What if steps taken on behalf of the out- 
cast should far outweigh marches of conquest and deeds of 
empire? Surprises — ah, yes, the surprises will be count- 
less and most embarrassing! Those who have been of 
great service to the King will be among the most surprised 
of all, as He alone convinces them that they have lived in 
a universe of fact and not of fiction. "And the King shall 
answer and say unto them. Inasmuch as ye did it unto 
one of these my brethren ye did it unto Me. Come, ye 
blessed of My Father, inherit the Kingdom prepared for 
you from the foundation of the world." I submit, in 



The Supreme Originality 65 

Christian faith and prayer, that the originality which over- 
takes, and is overtaken by, truth like this stands apart and 
alone, unique, indescribable, supreme. ^N'or i^ it altogether 
strange that the soul believing it should burst into song: 

'1 have found Thee, O God I 

Not in cold temples built by human hands, 
But in broad beneficence of skies, 

And in the flowering-time of meadowlands. 

I have heard Thy voice. 

Not in the pauses of a priestly prayer. 
But in the tender whisperings of the leaves 

And in the daily breathings of the air. 

I have felt Thy touch, 

Not in the rush of world's delight or gain, 
But in the stress of agony and tears. 

And in the slow pulsations of strong pain. 

I have known Thy love. 

Not when earth's flattering friends around me smiled, 
But in deep solitude of desolate days. 

Then wast Thou very gentle with Thy child. 

I have seen Thy face. 

Not only in the great Light of the Cross, 
But through the darkness of forgotten graves. 

And the pale, dawning recompense of loss. 

Yea, I have found Thee, God! 

Thy breath doth fill me with a strength divine! 
And were a thousand worlds like this my foes. 

The battle would be brief — the victory mine!" 



VI 

TO ATHENS— AISTD BEYOl^D! 

"They that conducted Paul brought him as far as Athens. 
But ye are come unto ]\Count Zion, and unto the city of the 
living God, the heavenly Jerusalem." — ^Acts xvii. 15; Heb. 
xii. 22. 

I have taken the liberty of knitting these two pas- 
sages up together because I think they belong together 
in a quite wonderful fashion. What, you ask, have Athens 
and the City of the living God in common ? We know that 
the Athens which Paul visited is not the Athens of to- 
day, nor has anybody in the flesh seen the 'New Jerusalem 
except in vision. Why, then, should we venture to place 
these two cities, one gone and the other not yet come, 
alongside of each other in our thinking? Because they 
belong together. Beauty and goodness must not be di- 
vorced; one is essential to the other; neither is perfect 
so long as the other is ignored. Both have a necessary 
value in our humanity and in the universe. Therefore, 
as we visit one city, let us bravely think of the other 
also. For the tale of these two cities is a parable of 
human life, of human civilization, and, finally, of the 
merging of life and of civilization into the universal 
Kingdom of God. 

I 

Journeying as far as Athens, we arrive at beauty of 
form. It is a journey nobly worth taking. Let no one 
blindly pass beauty by on the other side. The God 
of Beauty has thrust so much of external loveliness into 

66 



To Athens — anb Beyond! 67 

the world that only an incurable blindness succeeds in 
missing it. Some style of beauty haunts every highway 
of being, while the byways are also packed with it. But, 
in a special sense, Athens is a kind of unaging synonym 
for the beautiful. What tempiles, what statues, what 
paintings Paul and his companions found by going as far 
as Athens! Phidias married the gigantic to the delicate 
and these twain became one undying enchantment in mar- 
ble and gold. The legend says that Apelles painted such 
perfect grapes that birds pecked them, mistaking color 
for juice. Highest of all, Athens remains unsurpassed 
in the art of eloquence. Her orators in speech are as 
peerless as oratorios in music. Viewed from many an- 
gles, Athens enjoyed the charisma of beauty in a manner 
quite unique. Hence, the song of our American singer, 
saturated as he was by the Greek spirit: 

'Tf we but thought as the old Greeks thought^ 
And knew what the ancients knew — 
Then beauty sought of the soul were caught 
And breathed into being too — 
And out of the naught were the real wrought. 
And the dream of the world made true." 

Yes; we must go to Athens^ — and beyond! With the 
unveiling of the Godhead in Christ, it is not possible for 
human beings to spiritually survive in a universe limited 
to beauty of form. We must now attain unto beauty of 
soul. Except the beauty of the Lord, which is the beauty 
of holiness and of wholeness, break into the human spirit 
and utterly possess it for its own high uses, life is verily 
forlorn, too wise to be suckled on pagan creeds, too blase 
to climb the heavenly hills and bring down the sweetness 
which flows from those honeyed rocks. Men must have 
the Bread of Life, and feed upon it. Warm, rich, nutri- 
tious food from the heavenly cupboard is essential now. 
Civilization cannot go on as if there had been no Bethle- 



68 The Infinite Aetist and Othee Seemotts 

hem and no Calvary. Every time men attempt to go 
only as far as Athens and permanently dwell there, they 
are mysteriously but quite definitely reasoned with. Thus 
the weakness of the modern epoch is to substitute pagan 
cleverness for Christian reality. 'No preceding age has 
owned so many things as this one. What mechanical con- 
veniences, what domestic luxuries, what scientific ameliora- 
tions, what social improvements to-day! Why, then, this 
persistent, fog-drenched dissatisfaction on every hand ? It 
is not enough to criticize this universal restlessness as such, 
because restlessness may be a sign of life, of energy driving 
toward some goal, of groping after a hidden end. Old 
epochs do not die without a groan nor are new epochs bom 
without a cry. E'evertheless, this question will not down : 
Why the unappeased longing, the black-hearted dissatis- 
faction? It is because we are making things an end in- 
stead of a means. We are practicing sheer pagan clever- 
ness, all astir with scientific discovery, wielding the de- 
structive club of Hercules, wearing the boots of the ten- 
league-stepping giant, and ignoring the Christian facts 
and forces without which civilization cannot endure. We 
are now compelled to admit that the end of human life on 
this planet is either godlikeness or destruction, "either 
Utopia or hell," as Wells has phrased it. Vast discoveries 
are yet to be made in every realm ; but until we moderns 
take to heart the truth that, along with our material prog- 
ress, there must be a proportional spiritual depth and in- 
sight, there is no hope for us. Our inward reach must 
be at least commensurate with our outward grasp. Other- 
wise, in handling the things which perish with the using, 
humanity itself shall perish while using those things. 
What the world needs to-day is a new heart, not a new 
head. There is abundant room in our heads, to be sure, 
for more and finer knowledge; but what Man needs just 
now is the will to do the thing he already mentally knows, 



To Athens^ — ANit Beyond! 69 

but which he is brilliantly unable to morally and spiri- 
tually practice. A ^New York banker has purchased the 
dilapidated old village of Sparta on the Hudson, which 
he hopes to rebuild, peopling it with only the best citizens, 
and making it a model place. It is a high aim indeed and 
all lovers of humanity will wish the enterprise godspeed. 
Yet if this prospective or any other community greatly 
succeeds, it must not only go as far as the Athens of beauty 
— attractive houses, clean streets, thrifty commercial cen- 
ters, model school buildings, and such like; it must go 
beyond Athens — it must have in its heart and conscience 
the vision of the City of the living God, the heavenly 
Jerusalem. It must journey on to Calvary, to the de- 
spoiled Tomb, to the Upper Eoom, to the besieging, re- 
sponding Will whose flash of power makes all things new. 
Except civilization be born from above, it not only can- 
not see the Kingdom of Heaven, it shall not even retain 
the achievements and goods of the kingdom of civiliza- 
tion. Here is the new watchword for the new day : "The 
old that ages, he must let go, who would hold fast the 
old that ages not." 

II 

In going as far as Athens, we reach the first pure de- 
mocracy in history. Under the reforms of Cleisthenes, 
500 B.C., Athenians made their own laws in popular as- 
semblies. America, on the contrary, is a republic — a 
representative democracy. We think the American form 
of government is far superior to the Athenian; and, 
moreover, without being priggishly chauvinistic, we pre- 
fer our governmental system to any other yet devised. 
Without claiming perfection for it, and convinced that 
it is capable of improvement in some features, yet when 
somebody claims to understand in what direction such im- 



70 The Infinite Artist and Other Sermons 

provement can be made, most Americans regard him some- 
what as they do the philosopher who thought he knew 
how to improve the solar system. 

Yet, in all seriousness, must we not go to Athens and 
beyond in this matter of government also ? In the evo- 
lution of human life upon this planet, if I may further 
urge a thought already suggested, twentieth century civ- 
ilization must definitely relate itself to the Kingdom of 
God or go the way of ancient civilizations. Confessing 
that government is almost, in the nature of the case, lim- 
ited to the necessities of the average man, we must more 
vividly and practically realize what God's estimate of 
the average man really is. Here we come upon something 
unspeakably sublime. Human governments are content 
with making good citizens — and our awful criminal rec- 
ords remind us that this is a stupendous task ; yet we may 
be good citizens without penetrating beneath the surface 
of our manifold human capacities. As a matter of fact, 
there are multitudes of good citizens in this and all coun- 
tries who are of no higher moral caliber than the rankest 
pagans; some even boast of this tragic fact; they have 
been content to go as far as Athens, but the City of the 
living God holds no beauty for them that they should de- 
sire it. And herein lies the failure of the modern period. 
It has strenuously endeavored to get on without Christ. 
E'ow, as never before, He must be reckoned with in our 
human affairs every whit as much as gravitation in the 
physical universe. Our little world is undergoing vast 
disturbances, even as the attractive force of JSTeptune 
wrought such disturbances in the motion of Uranus that 
:N'eptune itself was finally discovered. What if our Chria- 
tian ISTeptune, concealed at the outermost system^ of things 
and yet nearer than blood is to veins and arteries, is dis- 
turbing our earthly clod with the possibility of undreamed 
disclosures or unimagined terrors? "Everywhere in na- 
ture," says the author of "The ^ew Chemistry," "there 



To Athei^s — ^AND Beyond! 71 

is a Presence which not only imparts power to particles but 
also directs each particle in its own appointed place/^ 
God not only notes the sparrow's fall and numbers the 
hairs of our heads, but^ according to this scientist, He di- 
rects and numbers the infinite particles of matter as well. 
Physicists say that if the energy in atoms could be freed, 
we should have a force undreamed of before, but that 
^'should its ethereal environment and its vibrations cease 
but an instant, all that is would crumble to dust." My 
argument is this: Ethereal environment for worlds and 
atoms is no more imperative than ethical rightness for 
nations and individuals. If the physical laws governing 
galaxies and electrons are the habits of Deity, there are 
certain great moral laws governing humanity which op- 
erate in the human realm just as unvaryingly as do the 
laws of energy in the physical. 

And have not these moral imperatives been divinely 
set forth in the Sermon on the Mount ? Governments must 
eventually order their lives by these unrepealable spiritual 
enactments or perish. So why not begin ? Our time has 
bloodily witnessed how misguided national ambitions are 
a venom-duct through which the poison of death is spurted 
into the body and soul of nations from the fang of hatred. 
Thus to preserve Man's hardly won gains out of the cen- 
turies, peoples must inbreathe the kindly, invigorating 
atmosphere coming down with dewlike pressure and dgs- 
tiny-fraught power from the white summits of God. Does 
any sane person question that this world would be un- 
believably improved by a practical inculcation of the 
Beatitudes ? Suppose we undertake to write them over the 
state houses of the earth, getting them into the souls of 
men, women, and children somewhat as follows. For 
America: "Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is 
the Kingdom of Heaven." For England: "Blessed are 
the meek : for they shall inherit the earth." For Armenia 
and Servia: "Blessed are they that mourn: for they 



72 The Infinite Artist and Other Sermons 

shall be comforted/' For France: "Blessed are they 
that hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall 
be filled." For Russia : "Blessed are the merciful : for they 
shall obtain mercy.'' For Germany: "Blessed are the 
peacemakers: for they shall be called sons of God." For 
Italy: "Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see 
God." For Belgium : "Blessed are they that have been per- 
secuted for righteousness' sake : for theirs is the Kingdom 
of Heaven." What a world this would be if these unyield- 
ing Christian certitudes were wrought into our internation- 
al soul ! War would be doomed. Hate would perish for lack 
of fuel to feed its angry fires. Political slander would die 
of its self -injected poison, like a snake dying of its own 
deadly stings. Coldly cruel inhumanity would vanish under 
the genial rays of brotherhood's golden sun. The blister of 
impurity would heal like a wound washed clean and whole- 
some by crimson tides of health. Oh, say not, I beseech 
you, that this is religious fancy ! It is God's everlasting 
fact ingrained in the soul of things — the celestial store^ 
house of untapped moral energy which Man must apply 
to his national and social problems or destroy himself 
by a planetary explosion, stored up by the generators of 
iniquity and set off by the batteries of destruction! 

Ill 

Going as far as Athens, we come among some of the 
famous persons of history. Greece has enough great 
names to carry her name to the end of time. Think of 
Homer, Draco, Sophocles, Solon, Pericles, Phidias, Soc- 
rates, Plato, and Aristotle! And yet we must go beyond 
Athens to find the supreme style of personality — unto the 
City of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem. "Even 
when we reach the climax of ancient civilization in Greece 
and Eome," says Illingworth, "there is no adequate sense, 
either in theory or practice, of human personality as such." 



To Athens — ai^j> Beyond! 7S 

Since the dawning of Christ upon our benighted human 
world, a new character-tune has been played out before 
the eyes of angels and men. There have been terrible 
reversions, of course, and there will be others still; yet 
we know that the spiritual geography of the race has been 
permanently remapped by Christ. The old iron-chorded 
strains in personality have been softened, subdued, and 
strengthened by inflowing melodies out of other and 
higher spheres. On his first visit to America, Ole Bull 
was opposed by certain prominent violinists in New York. 
James Gordon Bennett offered the Norwegian the col- 
umns of the Herald that he might answer his critics. 
"I tink,'' said Ole Bull, in his broken English, "it is 
best tey writes against me, and I plays against tem." 
It is a fine test, and the very one Christianity invites. 
"By their fruits ye shall know them," says the Grower 
of Personality from the Gardens of Eternity. 

Suppose, therefore, we gather up the three best heads 
in Athens and place them on the balances. They are 
Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Among the mightiest of 
the sons of men, they keep through the years, their sov- 
ereign walk in the paths of fame. Originally a sculptor, 
it was fitting that Socrates should graduate from cutting 
upon stones to cutting into souls. He succeeded so well 
that he was presented with a cup of poison — the charac- 
teristic way of each generation with its one immortal, 
about the sole apology the age has to offer succeeding ages 
for having been at all. Alcibiades, Xenophon, and Plato 
were the most celebrated pupils of Socrates, the last two 
of whom preserved the "Memorabilia" and the "Dia- 
logues" unto posterity. In Plato philosophic idealism 
got its foothold in a teacher able to climb many a bleak 
mountain of pessimism. For twenty-four centuries Pla- 
to's speculative genius has largely governed the thought 
of mankind. Eirst called Aristocles, he was later named 
Plato because of his broad shoulders. Certainly he was in- 



74 The Infinite Artist and Other Sermons 

tellectually and morally broad-shouldered, able to carry 
some of the burdensome mental loads of the race. The third 
in this trinity of human greatness was Aristotle. He may 
be justly regarded as the best exponent of ancient civi- 
lization. Yet, in the light of Christianity, how dark- 
hued are the faces of his mental children to us! First, 
he regarded some men as born to be savages, others as des- 
tined by nature to be slaves or living machines; further- 
more, he viewed women as nature's failures to produce 
men. Plato before him, taught practically the same. 
These, then, were the three major heads of the universe 
before Bethlehem. Having placed them on one side of 
the balances, now place Jesus, John, and Paul on the 
other side. What a different soul-climate we immediately 
feel ! ISTot for a flash do the balances remain stationary ; 
instantly the Athenians are infinitely outweighed by the 
citizens of the City of the living God. They reveal 
something new, something more bloomingly aware of 
heavenly soils, something whose roots are richly soaked 
in the water flowing from under the throne of the uni- 
verse ! Plato seems to have had the Christ-dream when he 
represents Socrates as saying: "We will wait for God, 
either God or a God-inspired man, to teach us our reli- 
gious duties and to take away the darkness from our 
eyes." The difference in these three figures out of the 
Athenian and Christian epochs is well expressed by 
Eucken: "Personality in the IN'ew Testament becomes 
a channel through which a higher world is created." 
Thus the City of the living God is wrought of new-cre- 
ated souls. Its streets and walls and temples are made 
of the superlative material woven by clean, white per- 
sonalities which secrete the stuff of Christianized imag- 
ination and will, of heart and mind reborn and rerisen 
into larger, ampler realms. We must not forget that 
the universe is full of ends as well as of means. As re- 
deemed human personality seems to be the chief end of 



To Athens — and Beyond! T5 

the -Qiiiverse, and, moreover, as personality in its richest 
expression is revealed in and through Jesus Christ and 
those living in communion with Him, the idea of John 
Burroughs that we are now compelled to forego all 
thoughts of a Personal God proves one thing and one 
thing only: That Mr. Burroughs is venturing in a field 
in which he is confessedly unfamiliar. It would be al- 
most sacrilegious to place Mr. Burroughs' thought of the 
Personality of God alongside that of Jesus; yet it may 
be done; and when done, it is done forever — at least with 
the naturalist's concept of the Deity, or, rather, of no 
Christian Deity. What is the ultimate fact of Christian- 
ity? Just this: Every soul may prove the Fatherhood 
of God for himself. And having done this through the 
grace of Christ, he is not greatly perturbed by the de- 
bates lustily conducted in scientific, psychologic, and phi- 
losophic kindergartens. With transfigured humility he 
himself begins to question these misguided masters: 
"Where is the wise? where is the scribe? where is the 
disputer of this age ? hath not God made foolish the wis- 
dom of the world ?" Yea, God hath done that very thing 
in Christ Jesus, and the works of God are perfect here 
as otherwhere. Therefore, why should a Christ-possessed 
soul camp on the dreary outer edge of philosophic and 
naturalistic speculation, when by faith he is momentarily 
winged into the hallowed >and hallowing Presence of 
"Our Father, Who art in Heaven." Beecher, who was 
a true master in things pertaining to human and Divine 
personality, once exclaimed: "Jesus Christ is my only 
God. I place my soul in His keeping as, when I was 
bom, my father placed me in the arms of my mother." 
Men are not clumsily argued into the Fatherhood or Per- 
sonality of God; they are born into it, mothered into it, 
or not at all. "The faith of immortality depends upon 
a sense of it begotten," said Horace Bushnell, "not on 
an argument for it concluded." Logic and argument 



76 The Iiq^Fii^iTE Artist and Other Sermoits 

have their legitimate sphere, but they were never or- 
dained to be midwives at the birth of Christian person- 
ality. The story says that Lincoln, on criticizing a Greek 
history because of its tediousness, was taken to task by 
a diplomat. "The author of that history, Mr. President," 
he said, "is one of the profoundest scholars of the age. 
Indeed it may be doubted whether any man of our genera- 
tion has plunged more deeply into the sacred fount of 
learning." "Yes, or come up drier," answered Lincoln. 
Somewhat in the same spirit, we are glad to recognize 
our indebtedness to Mr. Burroughs for the information 
he interestingly gives us about trees and birds and bugs 
and frogs; we do not, however, recognize any such obliga- 
tion in matters in which he seems not at all qualified to 
speak. If I were a gambler operating in the open markets 
of destiny, I would wager the words, deeds, and character 
of Jesus Christ against all the foolishness of scientists, 
sinners, and philosophers, against all the sins, agonies, 
deaths, and hells in the universe. Therefore, we will go 
as far as Athens, but we cannot stop there; our faces 
are set toward the City of the living God, the heavenly 
Jerusalem ! 

ly 

Moreover, in going as far as Athens, Paul found him- 
self face to face with a superficial, miscellaneous infor- 
mation bureau. If you want to know the quality of in- 
tellectual food the Athens of Paul's time was eating, just 
read the following verse: "E'ow all the Athenians and 
the strangers sojourning there spent their time in noth- 
ing else, but either to tell or to hear some new thing." 
The test of everything, you see, was newness, not true- 
ness; hence the Athenian constitution for sensationalism 
was abnormally developed, being a forerunner of that 
phase of the modern mind which is always learning, but 
never able to come to a knowledge of the truth. Babblers 



To Athens — ai^d Beyond! 77 

themselves, Epicurean and Stoic philosophers and their 
hangers-on concluded that everyhody else helonged in a 
similar class. "What/ would this hahhler say?" they 
asked, taking hold of Paul and hringing him unto the 
Areopagus. 

'Now what is the golden truth gleaming amid so much 
leaden nonsense ? Paul was a preacher of the Gospel, a 
herald of the Good !N"ews of Heaven for a lost world. 
Athens never imagined a message like that. Though her 
pantheon was consecrated to all the gods, she was ignorant 
of the one true God, truly revealed in His only hegotten 
Son. And was humanity ever more sorely in need of the 
Good l^ews than to-day ? In a sense, it is very much more 
difficult for men to live an achieving, victorious life now 
than in the comparatively simple ages of the past. The 
universe is so much vaster, hoth in space and time, than 
the old ages were aware; society is organized in such a 
bewildering fashion; there are so many competing inter- 
ests demanding our attention that we are always near the 
abyss of a divided mind ; the ends of the earth have been 
moved in toward each other with such confusing proximity ; 
racial problems, weighted with the remainders of heathen- 
ism and fraught with the selfishness of modernity, are 
actually pressing; and, above all else, there is the ageless 
problem of human sin and mischoice, black, menacing, ter- 
rible, big with the possibilities of world-destruction. Are 
we going, in such straits, only as far as Athens? ^ay, 
verily! We must seek the City of the living God, re- 
acquaint ourselves with its Glad Tidings and proclaim the 
Divine Love in Christ, by word and deed, unto the ends 
of the earth, unto all conditions and grades of human 
beings in city and village and country and mountain. And 
we must tell it out with the white-hot conviction that it 
is the sole remedy for a world sick unto death ! Why, that 
soul-miracle of which John B. Gough used to tell has been 
dupliaated in literalljy fthouslands of instancies. In a 



78 The Iistfin-ite Aetist ai^td Other Sermons 

beautiful home, said Gough, a son had sunk so low that 
the father had turned him into the street. Motherlike, the 
woman who bore him pleaded that one room might be re- 
served for their boy ; the father need never see him at all ; 
she, the mother, would care for him. While a guest in 
the home, Mr. Gough was asked by the mother to say 
a word to her poor boy. Going upstairs, the great Chris- 
tian reformer found a miserable, degraded piece of hu- 
manity. "Edward," he said, "do you not sometimes re- 
gret terribly the life you are leading?" "Indeed, I do, 
Mr. Gough." "Then why do you not abandon it?" "I 
cannot," came the despairful answer. "I am bound hand 
and foot, and I will have to go on this way until I die." 
Practicing the divine art of bringing an immortal being 
to himself, Mr. Gough asked: "Edward, do you ever 
p^ay?" "ISTo," he said, "I don't believe in God; I don't 
believe in anything, Mr. Gough." "Edward, do you be- 
lieve in your mother?" Ah! what a look came into the 
prodigal's face as the music of mother-love began to sing 
about the roots of his being ! "Yes, Mr. Gough," he said, 
"that is the only thing in the world that I do believe in — 
my mother!" "Edward, do you think your mother loves 
you?" "Oh, I am sure of HV "Then you T)eliev6 
in love, don't you? You believe that there is at least 
one good thing in this world, and that is love, because 
your mother loves you ?" "Well, yes, I suppose I do be- 
lieve in love." "Edward, when I have gone out," pleaded 
Mr. Gough with loving eloquence, "will you promise mo 
that you will kneel down and offer a prayer to Love, and 
ask Love to help you?" After a brief hesitation, the 
promise was made. When Mr. Gough had gone, the 
hopeless man knelt down — feeling, as he afterwards ex- 
pressed it, like a fool — and prayed: "0 Love!" In- 
stantly, from out of the deeps of Heaven came a voice 
saying: "God is Love." Then he cried: "O God!" 
Quicker than thought another voice burst from the 



To Athens — anb Beyond! 79! 

heavens of God's Soul into Ms own, saying: "God 
so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, 
that whosoever believeth on Him should not perish, but 
have eternal life." Then did the man shout aloud: "O 
Christ !'' — and the heavenly deed was done in a heavenly 
fashion! Eushing downstairs into the kitchen where his 
mother was preparing food for him with her own hands, 
he folded her to his breast as he wept aloud: "O Love! 
O Love ! O Love !" It is the Eternal Love, my friends, that 
is under the burden and soul of things ! Let us believe it 
because we live it. It will lend a deepening loveliness to 
all that Athens has; it will ever set us upon higher ven- 
tures and richer disclosures in the City of the living 
God, the heavenly Jerusalem! 



VII 

HOUSEKEEPIiq^G A]^D SOULKEEPmG 

"But Martha was cumbered about much, serving; and she 
came up to Him, and said, Lord, dost Thou not care that my 
sister did leave me to serve alone? bid her therefore that she 
help me. But the Lord answered and said unto her, Martha, 
Martha, thou art anxious and troubled about many things : but 
one thing is needful : for Mary hath chosen the good part, which 
shall not be taken away from her." — St. Luke x. 40, 41, 42. 

Looking in upon this home in Bethany, are we not 
aided in visualizing and solving our own duties and prob- 
lems ? For moral struggle has a fashion of concentrating 
itself in Bethany as well as in Chicago and 'New York. 
The modern phase may carry more of glitter and roar, but 
the heart of the matter was back there in the first century 
also. The social system of which Mary and Martha were 
members was comparatively simple ; but their soul-system 
was bewilderingly complex ; and this, after all, constitutes 
the burden and obligation of every age. In a word, the 
difficulty of each of us is to properly adjust our outer and 
inner relations, our bodies and our spirits, our individual 
capacity and our social duty. This brings us face to face 
with God. Perhaps Mary was an unconscious mystic 
while Martha was an equally unconscious pragmatist. But 
neither alone is sufficient; the two must be fused; but — 
how? That is the question of the ages, the crux of all 
religions, the riddle of society. Has the question an an- 
swer? Yes! Christ is the absolute answer — the clue to 
the quandary of housekeeping and soulkeeping in its 
varied and ever-present forms and expressions. 

80 



Housekeeping and Soulkeeping 81 



Pouring into our terms the richest possible content, let 
us remark that housekeeping without soulkeeping is trag- 
ical. Consider, first, housekeeping in its purely domestic 
aspect. While the facts might not justify us in thinking 
of Mary as a thorough-going idealist or of Martha as a 
thorough-going pragmatist, yet are there not hints of each 
in these Bethany sisters? Housekeeping seems to have 
gotten the upper hand of Martha. Perhaps while Mary 
sat at the Master's feet, Martha kept casting significant 
glances at her mystical sister from somewhere in the 
vicinity of the kitchen. At last, worried by her busyness, 
she came up and said: ^'Lord, is it all one to you that 
my sister has left me to do all the work alone? Come, 
tell her to lend me a hand." Is an overwrought mind 
manifesting itself in this outbreak ? Was Martha, in our 
modern phrase, simply the victim of ^^nerves?" If so, 
then Martha is truly symbolic of our era. Stepping into 
a taxicab, a woman exclaimed: "Driver, do be careful! 
Unused to riding in these machines, I am very nervous." 
"Lady," rejoined the chauffeur, "just be at your ease. 
You haven't a thing on me in nervousness — ^this is the 
first time I've ever tried to drive a taxi !" All of which 
is just another way of saying that "nerves" spell in- 
efficiency. For back of true housekeeping is high soul- 
keeping — in the twentieth century as in the first. When 
the task, whatever it be, becomes an end in itself, the 
result is heartache and disappointment. The end of being 
is the making of souls; the universe can have no otlier 
final significance; therefore, anything that hinders in the 
work of soul-making argues a world gone wrong, life 
critically out of joint. Bergson has a remarkable defi- 
nition of matter. "Matter," he affirms, "is that which 
attempts to obstruct the progress of life." l^ow substi- 
tute the word "politicians" for "matter," and will not 



82 The Infii^ite Artist and Other Sermons 

tJie philosoplier's words yield a second definition? But 
whether it is matter, or housekeeping, or politics — ^what- 
ever it is which thwarts domestic, individual, national, 
and international soul-making — is wrong, and should be 
removed forthwith. And to-day, as always, is it not to 
the fireside that we must look for the removal of many 
of the world-old wrongs? If the letters of these seven 
little twentieth century girls are indicative of a better 
domestic to-morrow, we may well take courage. For in 
this contest, conducted by the Continent, in which girls 
are asked to write of their ambitions for the future, there 
is abundant reason for great good hope. While one is 
going to be an artist, one a historian, one a dressmaker, 
one an archaeologist, and one a trained nurse, two are 
highly resolved to be home-builders and mothers. "I am 
almost nine years old," writes one. "If there is any- 
thing in the world I love, it is a baby. Twenty years 
from now I mean to be a mother. I mean to study hard 
right now and learn to keep a home weU, so I may be a 
good mother." Says the other: "Twenty years from to- 
day I mean to be married. I should like to have lots of 
fun before I am married and then settle down to a nice 
quiet life. I should like to have little twins, a boy and 
girl." Of course we smile at their innocence — the lilied 
loveliness of white souls still sparkling with the dews 
of life's morning. Yet a glimpse backward and forward, 
as well as a serious study of the present, warrants the 
conclusion that motherhood, glorified by the immemorial 
sanctities of the race, is one of the profound needs of 
the world. "What France needs more than anything else," 
said Napoleon, "is mothers." It is likewise the need of 
America. But motherhood is deeply twined about the 
roots of soulhood; and soulhood must be nourished by 
those bracing atmospheres wherein housekeeping is rein- 
forced and sustained by soulkeeping. 

But housekeeping must have a wider application than 



Housekeeping and Soulkeeping 83 

the domestic phase. Our cominercial housekeeping must 
also be shot through and through with the power of soul- 
keeping. Otherwise this, too, holds all the elements of 
tragedy. Men dare not give themselves up exclusively 
to buying and selling. JSTeglect of the soul through undue 
attention to banks, stores, shops, factories, and railroads 
makes escape from spiritual doom and death impossible. 
A nation of shopkeepers is finally a nation of self-de- 
stroyers. There are some things God cannot do, and one 
is this: God cannot permanently and richly bless a peo- 
ple who make goods and gold their gods. A student re- 
minds us of the difficulty God has in answering the peti- 
tion: "Give us this day our daily bread.'' For to our 
modem world much more is involved than the regularity 
of the seasons, the farmer, the miller, and the baker. 
There is also the stupendous problem of distribution ; and 
behind this there is the still more stupendous problem 
of human nature, in which the worst elements of capi- 
talism and bolshevism are struggling for the mastery. That 
is why God has an increasingly more difficult task in 
answering the petition for humanity's daily sustenance. 
There is but one solution to this pressing problem — and 
one only ! It is the way of Christ — ^brotherhood, service, 
cooperation, and sacrifice. The modem age must adopt 
Christ's way or go in for self-destruction on a more gigan- 
tic scale than ever. If our highly complex modern meth- 
ods make it more difficult for God to answer the daily 
• bread petition, then is it not even more imperative for men 
to unite in a worldwide endeavor to make that essential 
petition divinely answerable? But it cannot be done by 
cleverness alone, nor chiefly; it cannot be done by ma- 
chinery alone, nor chiefly ; it cannot be done by the League 
of ^Nations alone, nor chiefly. These are at most but im- 
plements, necessary but not final, initial but not all. The 
first word and the last is Soul — the Soul of the Eternal 
functioning through the Soul of the Human, quickening, 



84 The Infinite Aetist and Other Seemons 

forgiving, inliving, and exalting it out of its meanness 
and low aims into the purposes and ideals for whicli human 
beings were created. Here, it seems to me, is a self- 
evident proposition: Commercial housekeeping without 
commercial soulkeeping grows increasingly unsatisfactory, 
becoming in the end woefully intolerable. 

Moreover, national housekeeping without soulkeeping 
is foredoomed to disaster. Thoughtful men are to-day 
hanging their heads in shame because of the abyss of self- 
ishness and un-Americanism into which our nation has been 
dragged. In discussing America's duties and obligations, 
the thinking of many seems to run along two lines : First, 
hatred of Woodrow Wilson, and, second, an appeal to our 
national selfishness. !N'ow, if you are opposed to America 
entering the League of ITations (and the rest of the world 
is rapidly approaching the viewpoint when it does not 
care whether we go in or stay out) — ^but if in this mat- 
ter your conscience is your guide and not your accomplice, 
then I charge you, before God and before the bar of his- 
tory, to lift your arguments to a higher plane than hatred 
and selfishness. For what is this mysterious and wonder- 
ful America of ours ? How are you going to reach and 
appraise its soul? Are there not too many varieties of 
America extant to-day? First, there is the America of 
the politician. He is frothing at the mouth — ^not because 
of excess of patriotism, but solely because of a perpetual 
and acute attack of lust for office. There is the America 
of the capitalist. He looks upon America as a big, golden, 
juicy orange out of which to squeeze liquid drops of s:old. 
There is the America of the bolshevist. Infernal in him- 
self, he manipulates infernal machines. He is like the 
Chinaman in Lamb's storv. A pisr was roasted bv the 
accidental burninsr of a Chinese home. The owner shared 
his roast pis' with his neie-hbors. It proved so delicious 
to the taste that forthwith Chinamen began burninsr down 
their houses in order to eat roast pig. The bolshevist 



HOUSEKEEPIIS'G AND SoULKEEPINa 85 

would burn down the house to destroy the rat in the base- 
ment, not even having roast pig as the result of his dev- 
iltry. There is the America of the partisan. Frankly, 
he is one of the worst enemies within the nation, because 
he belongs to a large class. Lining up with one of the 
two old political parties, he quadrennially becomesi a 
roving and raving patriot, and all because he is so blindly 
partisan that he is unable to distinguish between a prin- 
ciple and the politician who has hoodwinked him. On 
the one hand, he says that he belongs to the party of 
Thomas Jefferson; whereas if he were introduced to 
Jefferson, that mighty soul would be constrained to say: 
"Depart from me, you worker of iniquity — I never knew 
you." On the other hand, he says that he belongs to the 
party of Abraham Lincoln ; whereas, if Lincoln were back 
in the flesh, and here in the America for which he lived and 
died, one accusing flash from his martyr eyes would send 
this treacherous political Judas reeling back into his own 
place. There is the America of the militarist. He is the 
champion of the fighting man and the fighting nation. 
He does not think it a sign of health for humanity's tiger 
and ape to die; so he is determined upon a vast military 
establishment, whereby civilization may be periodically 
turned into a shambles. And so the list might be enlarged. 
But there is a better America — an America infinitely re- 
moved from any of these. It is the America of the Chris- 
tian. Loving his own land as he loves no other, he is not 
only ready to die for it, but he is living daily so that his 
America may become fairer, juster, cleaner, more Christ- 
like. He does not say, with Stephen Decatur: "Our 
country! In her intercourse with foreign nations may 
she always be in the right; but our country, right or 
wrong." !N'o — a thousand times no! Such chauvinism 
is a species of mentality akin to the Hun. Eather does 
the Christian American say: "Our country! In her 
relations with all peoples may she always be in the right. 



86 The Infinite Aetist and Othee Seemons 

But if she is not rigHt, God helping me, I will help to 
make her right." My friends, it is only a Christian 
America — and the America of to-day is very far from any 
such ideal — ^that can survive. I believe this as I believe 
in God, as I believe in the law of gravity, as I believe in 
the national dooms which have been pronounced upon 
every selfish, godless nation in history. I am against the 
America of the partisan, the bolshevist, the capitalist, the 
militarist, and the politician. Eor that is the America 
of mere housekeeping without soulkeeping; I know that 
such a house is built on the sand instead of on the rock; 
therefore, when the tides of justice begin to surge in from 
the deeps of eternity and the winds of destruction begin 
to blow from off the unbribed tablelands and high hills 
of God, such a national house is as certain to go down 
in wreck and ruin as l!^ineveh and Babylon lie buried 
this good hour beneath the debris of ages. God save us 
— and God help us to save ourselves — for national house- 
keeping without national soulkeeping is the forerunner 
of national doom! 

II 

Consider, now, the other side of our truth. If Martha 
is ultra-practical, perhaps Mary is ultra-mystical. Any 
soulkeeping which neglects or ignores the legitimate de- 
mands of individual, social, and national housekeeping — 
the human, practical, common things of life — is not whole- 
somely, sanely Christian. Applied Christianity is the 
heart-searching need of our time. Unceasing and intelli- 
gent emphasis of this truth is necessary. How many 
heartily accept all the Christian theories and but coyly 
apply the Christian realities! Few indeed are the men 
who dispute the verities of the Sermon on the Mount. 
But just let some man with faith enough and love enough 
and vision enough undertake to translate its principles 
into national and international activities, and lo ! he is an 



Housekeeping and Soulkeeping 87 

autocrat, a hypiocrite, a usurper, a dictator, a phrase^maker, 
obstinate, deceitful, insincere, jealous of friends and 
enemies alike — a kind of monster in human form ! Which 
reminds me of a parable. A certain man, before he be- 
came a preacher, was a horse-trader. Recounting his 
success, he said : "In trading horses, I never said a word ; 
I just let the other fellow do the talking. But I watched 
him closely while he examined my horse. Then, after he 
began pointing out the flaws in my horse, I looked for 
the very same blemishes in his and invariably found them." 
Because men condemn autocracy, pride, and selfishness in 
others is no guarantee that they themselves are unfree of 
these vices. Indeed, it is more than probable that they 
are simply reading into others, especially if those others 
have been instrumental in thwarting their own malign 
purposes, the very shortcomings which rule their lives. 
But however this may be, Christianity must be applied on 
a imiversal scale. Civilization has reached the end of 
its tether of scheming and cleverness. These makeshifts 
are fully discovered at last and set before the face of men 
even as they have ever appeared in the light of God's 
countenance. They are disclosed as covenants with death, 
agreements with hell, and plans for worldwide destruction. 
This has become an appallingly dangerous world in which 
to live; and nothing save the righteousness of God in 
Christ can arrest and remove the black menace and im- 
pending disaster overhanging the nations. What a warn- 
ing is this from President Hadley: "The politicians in 
Jerusalem nineteen hundred years ago were singularly like 
the politicians in Washington to-day. Did Pontius Pilate 
lack courage? Did Felix and Festus and Agrippa lack 
courage? I think not. They lacked knowledge of the 
situation with which they had to deal. They were con- 
tent to be mere opportunists, more concerned to avoid 
immediate unpopularity or the danger of political dis- 
order than to settle controversies which their training had 



88 The Infinite Abtist and Other Seemons 

not fitted them to understand. But we know what came 
of the work of Pontius Pilate and the Roman governors 
that followed him. The policy which was intended to 
keep the peace resulted in civil war of the worst and 
most destructive kind." 

Thus, as this scholar reminds us, the verdict of history 
is this : Nations have a right to the Christian values and 
enrichments. The time has gone by for us to think of 
the negative and preventive Christian truths ; we must as- 
sert their positive, life-giving, nation-saving power. Take, 
for example, the Golden Rule. The custodians of gov- 
ernment have always considered it as a kind of luxurious 
attachment, a bit of brocade, to be fastened upon the outer 
garments of society. We have simply toyed with the truth 
that we must do unto others as we would that others should 
do unto us. Individuals have reverenced it and states- 
men have quoted it, let us hope, in all sincerity. But 
quotation is not sufficient — operation is imperative. The 
Golden Rule is governmentally and internationally work- 
able, and the people are entitled to its benefits. It will 
prevent much — that is true; but Christianity is not a 
fire insurance scheme; it is not a means of escape from 
calamity, but a method of the total enrichment of human 
life here and now. ^^I am come that they may have life," 
says our Lord, ^^and that they may have it more abun- 
dantly." Living in a palace of theories and watching the 
world go to destruction is not Christian. We must call 
down the fire of reality and burn up our illusive mental 
rubbish and make-believe. Is not St. John one of the 
supreme mystics of history? Yet does he make short 
shrift of all fine theories devoid of the Christ-spirit. "If 
a man say, I love God," says this virginal old prophet, 
"and hateth his brother, he is a liar: for he that loveth 
not his brother whom he hath seen, cannot love God whom 
he hath not seen." Plainly, this prophet is not afraid of 
the "ugly word." There are times, my friends, when 



Housekeeping and Soulkeeping 89 

the "ugly word'' has no synonym, when euphemism is 
stark impertinence; and one of those times is when a 
false cleavage is made between theism and humanism. 
They are not two but one — double aspects of one glowing 
whole. If an expert is usually a man a long distance 
from home, a sky-gazing disciple is one a long distance 
from God. Our religion is not of the earth earthy, but 
its glory is revealed in its power to invade our earthliness 
and touch it unto nobler issues. "Let a man remember/' 
said Henry Drummond, "that the great thing is not to 
think about religion, but to do it. We do not live in a 
'think' world. It is a real world." And is not Chris- 
tianity the one reality equal to the demands of our real 
world ? Untold millions of individuals have demonstrated 
this. When the real world crumbled beneath their feet, 
they fell gloriously through its ruins into a realm of un- 
yielding worth and permanence. Our gigantic task to- 
day is to again individualize and then socialize and inter- 
nationalize this truth. Make no mistake — it cannot be- 
come a part of the social whole until it is first a possession 
of the individual soul. As God makes a universe of sepa- 
rate atoms, though each is in relation to all, so He makes 
Christ's Kingdom through transfigured individuals, each 
being related to and cooperating with all homeward-striv- 
ing souls. Martha must learn to make her bread without 
denying Mary her right to the Bread of Life. Mary 
must nourish her inner beins: without forgetting the Chris- 
tian demands of Martha's bodily necessities. 

Ill 

Consequently, this brings us, in our thinking, to the 
solution of the acute and pressing problem of life. For, 
in the large view, life's problem is not housekeeping alone 
or soulkeeping alone. Our difficulty is in doing both in 
such fashion that the aim of each may be completely 



90 The Infiis^ite Aetist and Other Seemons 

realized. And this, I affirm, is the secret of our Lord. 
He alone is the point of contact for the earthly and 
heavenly sides of human life. Consider this proposition 
from two viewpoints. 

Christ invariably honors the natural. "Martha, 
Martha,'' he pleadingly says to this overwrought house- 
keeper, "thou art anxious and troubled about many things, 
but a few are all we need." Even though our blessed Lord 
carries such a large spiritual capital that He seems at 
times quite able to dispense with the natural methods 
of being, He is so inexhaustibly human as to exemplify 
in Himself the only ideally perfect life known to earth. 
What right has the artificial, the false, the non-human, 
asceticism for its own sake, a pervert^ed naturalism or a 
distorted spiritualism, in His thinking and living ? Over 
all He sheds the glow of a winsome naturalness. How 
little children loved Him and discovered within the clasp 
of His arms the tenderness of a new-found motherhood! 
How the blind hailed His appearance in their benighted 
world like a sunrise dismissing the realms of darkness! 
How the oppressed and ostracized found in Him a cham- 
pion challenging all the legions of tyranny and hate! 
What colors did He see in the flowers! What music 
rained upon His ear from wide-winged minstrels of the 
air! Did He not have medicine for the sick, cheer for 
the sad, hope for the hopeless, victory for the vanquished, 
love for the loveless, welcome for the wanderer, and 
Heaven for all who would have it? Verily, our Lord 
Jesus Christ is the first and only completely human life 
yet lived upon the earth. 

But — and this is the second phase of Christ's secret^ — 
in honoring the natural He breaks through and into the 
spiritual, out of which flow the celestial medicines and 
balms for our terrestrial hurts. For living in the spir- 
itual is the only way of truly honoring the natural. "Now 
every soul has a past^ — although it is a gracencleansed and 



Housekeeping and Soulkeeping 91 

love-whitened past. The bloom on Mary's soul is now 
very sweet and pure. But how much of it is due to the 
bitter roots planted in the soils of yesterday God alone 
knows. I believe that Mary of Magdala and Mary of 
Bethany are the same person. Some scholars have al- 
ways held this view, but professor David Smith, in 
"The Days of His Flesh,'' the richest biographical study 
of Christ yet produced, seems to settle the matter. With- 
out attempting to deduce all the evidence tending to pirove 
their identity, I wish simply to recall two 'New Testament 
scenes and one saying of St. John. The first picture 
is in the seventh chapter of St. Luke: "And one of the 
Pharisees desired Him that He would eat with Him. 
And He entered into the Pharisee's house, and sat down 
to meat. And behold, a woman who was in the city, 
a sinner; and when she knew that He was sitting at 
meat in the Pharisee's house she brought an alabaster 
cruse of ointment, and standing behind at His feet, 
weeping, she began to wet His feet with her tears, and 
wiped them with the hair of her head, and kissed His 
feet, and anointed them with the ointment." IN'ow turn 
to the second picture as given by St. John in the 
twelfth chapter: "Jesus therefore six days before the 
passover came to Bethany, where Lazarus was, whom 
Jesus raised from the dead. So they made Him a sup- 
per there: and Martha served; but Lazarus was one of 
them that sat at meat with Him. Mary therefore took 
a pound of ointment of pure nard, very precious, and 
anointed the feet of Jesus, and wiped His feet with her 
hair: and the house was filled with the odor of the oint- 
ment." "Now, in writing of the resurrection of Lazarus 
in the eleventh chapter, St. John says: "And it was 
that Mary who anointed the Lord with ointment, and 
wiped His feet with her hair, whose brother Lazarus was 
sick." It is not impossible, of course, that two different 
Marys performed precisely the same beautiful rites of 



92 The Iitfii^ite Aetist and Othee Seemons 

gratitude for the Lord. Yet it is most improbable. The 
delicate reserve of St. Luke in refusing to mention the 
name of the woman in the house of the Pharisee is nat- 
ural. Mary and her friends were still living when Luke 
wrote. But when St. John penned his glorious memo- 
rabilia the members of the Bethany home had all been 
transferred to the House not made with hands. Perhaps 
the facts are somewhat as follows: Mary had wandered 
away from home — even away up into the haunts of har- 
lot-ridden Magdala. One day she heard Jesus speak of 
the Love Unfailing. Quivering with shame and trembling 
with tears, memories of Bethany and home were awak- 
ened in her home-sick soul. That very hour she began to 
follow Jesus. Everywhere He went she went. One day 
she heard Simon the Pharisee invite Jesus to his home. 
Unable to restrain the desire to be in His presence, Mary 
went as an uninvited guest. After silently witnessing 
the cold courtesy which Simon accorded to her Master, 
and impelled by the new life with which Jesus had in- 
spired her, Mary threw dead formality to the winds, stole 
up alongside the Saviour, and wrought that deed of love 
which will be rehearsed when empires and republics are 
all dust whirled about the iron hills! Yes; that home 
in Bethany is the exact spiritual counterpart of that 
other home portrayed in the parable of the Prodigal Son. 
Martha — good, faithful, homekeeping Martha^ — is simply 
a female transcript of the elder brother. Her life con- 
sisted in handling things; Mary, too, was familiar with 
the rights and uses of things. But oh ! somehow, battered 
by the shocks of doom, torn upon the hot wheels of sin, 
and marvelously recovered by that Love which outlasts 
doom even while it outlives sin, Mary had learned to dwell 
deep — deep down among the roots of life everlasting. 
Therefore, she had her golden moods, her hours of quiet, 
her moments of speechless ecstasy — listening to the un- 
voiced and remembering the untold. I wonder if she was 



Housekeeping and Soulkeeping 93 

in one of those moods that day when, sitting at the Mas- 
ter's feet and wrapt away in wonders eternal, Martha 
suddenly broke in upon the Lord's discourse and Mary's 
silence ? I know not ; but the Saviour and the saved know, 
and that is too greatly sacred for idle speech. Enough 
it is to recall that when the Martha-spirit within all of 
us insists so clamorously upon its "many things," the only 
way to master its strident tones is to break through into 
the world eternal and to sweetly discover that just a 
few — or even one — of its notes of harmony are all that 
is needful for our checkered years, even as they will 
be sufficient for our ongoing aeons of the illimitable future. 



VIII 

E^EW AND OLD 

"Brethren, I count not myself yet to have laid hold; but one 
thing I do, forgetting the things which are behind, and stretch- 
ing forward to the things which are before, I press on toward 
the goal unto the prize of the high calling of God in Christ 
Jesus."— Phil. iii. 13, 14. 

How to find the new in the old, and the old in the new — 
this is a secret of a strong, fresh life. Is it possible to 
find such a secret? Has such a secret been unveiled to 
the wondering hearts of men ? Christianity answers yes. 
And its answer is more than a mere word. Supremely, 
there is the affirmation of the Lord Christ Himself. Then 
there is the affirmation of the heaven-wrought souls. We 
call them John, Peter, Paul. We call them a great and 
numberless multitude, living and dead. All affirm that 
Christianity proclaims the Eternal amidst the temporal, 
the changeless amidst the changeful. Stevenson said the 
livableness of life is the great theorem. But only Chris- 
tianity can demonstrate it. Christ in the heart insures 
more than life's bare livableness. He thrills life with 
unflagging joys, fills life with vast and mighty meanings, 
rescues life from littleness, sets it on high at the right 
hand of God. 

I think Paul is one of the noblest illustrations of this 
truth. He has for all time shown us how to blend the 
new and the old. It would hardly be appropriate to say 
that Paul grew old gracefully. If he grew old at all, he 
did it strenuously, lustily. Frankly, in reading our text, 

94 



!N"ew AisD Old 95 

can one linger long over the age-aspect of the apostle's 
life? Are we not rather conscious of a life lifted above 
the power of age? Is there not here the spring-like 
freshness of a fadeless youth ? We are told that this let- 
ter was written in the dank darkness of an underground 
cell. But is it not lustrous with a light surpassing stones 
of fire? We are also reminded that his friends had for- 
saken him. But is there not in this epistle the sweet 
perfume of a more than human friendship? Moreover, 
ITero's deadly ax was ready to be lifted above his head. 
But are we not impressed that here is a deathless life ? 
Surely, the ancient old and the eternal new are met to- 
gether in Paul. 

I want us to see how the apostle exemplifies the power 
of holding both new and old in their true relations ; how 
he makes the new experience complete the old principle; 
how he lets the old foundation support the new and ever- 
enlarging superstructure. 



The ITewness in the Old : "Brethren, I count not my- 
self yet to have laid hold ; but one thing I do, forgetting 
the things which are behind." Is there not here a vivid 
sense of the unattained ? Is there not a deep consciousness 
of unappropriated riches in grace ? Is there not a pulsing 
passion to realize that which is meant for the individual 
soul, the spiritual perception of a fresh, vital newness 
within the heart of the ancient oldness? 

It is, I think, a suggestive picture of two men walking 
across the world at our very side. There is, first, the 
self-sufficient man. He says: "I count myself to have 
laid hold. I have looked into the heart of things. I 
used to think a mystic splendor nestled there. But I 
think so no longer. I have been undeceived. The splen- 
dor was only gaudy tinsel." Have you never met such 



96 The Infittite Aetist and Other SEEMoiirs 

a man ? At tlie same time, do yon recall a more desolate 
sonl ? For him the magic of spring is gone, the green of 
summer has lost its emerald beanty, the autumn's pictured 
glory has vanished. The winter's snowy whiteness en- 
chants no more. The laughter of little children is at last 
unmusical. The love, the heroism, the patience, the pain, 
the joy, the hope of this throbbing, unfolding human 
world — all this fails to quicken and inspire. O, this self- 
sufficient man ! He dooms himself to the outer glooms of 
a joyless existence! 

But see, on the contrary, the other, the Pauline man. 
He finds a perennial freshness in the old. "Brethren," 
he says, "I count not myself yet to have laid hold. I have 
visioned the Eternal. Indeed, I have experienced some^ 
what the new power bursting from the oM founts of 
truth. Still, I am painfully conscious of standing only 
on the edge of things. It is all so rich, so deep, so in- 
exhaustible." Here is your limitless man set over against 
your self-limited man. Life is to him a dawning morning 
wonder. He does not lament "those golden dawn-times" 
of forgotten ages. He reverences them because they have 
paved the way for his srlorious living present. Duty is 
to him an unexplored diamond mine. He enters it with 
resolute purpose, searches all its hidden caverns, and 
comes forth with duty's precious dust e-leaming in the srar- 
ments of his soul. ISTor is he daunted by suffering. Pain 
is to him the angel that sets the diamonds of duty in their 
proportionate relations. Have you seen that wondrous 
plant called "the crown of thorns?" It is a marvelously 
twisted and intertwisted creation, shaped into a perfect 
crown, all studded with pricMy thorns. Moreover, it pro- 
duces a most delicate and beautiful flower. One day T 
a sked the florist : "How often does the ^crown of thorns' 
bloom ?" "Continuously," was his laconic answer. Thus, 
to the man in Christ, does his crown of thorns blossom into 
the crown of life. There is a constant bursting of thorny 



!N"ew ai^d Old 97 

things into richest blooms. All the time, everywhere, this 
man is a true pioneer of the invisible. With Markham, 
he 

"Sees, in some dead leaf, dried and curled. 

The deeper meaning of the world; 

Hears through the roar of mortal things 

The God's immortal whisperings; 

Sees the world wonder rise and fall. 

And knows that beauty made it all." 

Consider, also, the second way of realizing the new in 
the old. You see it in the apostle's steadfast ability to 
let go ; "But one thing I do, forgetting the things which 
are behind." 

l^ow let us say at once that there are some things which 
can not, and ought not, be forgotten. Paul is the last man 
to treat the past with contempt. A wise appreciation of 
the present always includes reverence for the past. "Our 
finest hope," says George Eliot, "is finest memory." "It 
is to live twice over to be able to enjoy your past," says 
the Eoman poet. A modern philosopher reminds us that 
"our life is seven-eighths memory. The present is a frac- 
tion of a moment. We behold it most securely when it 
has become a past." We are not to forget ageless prin- 
ciples, timeless revelations, the sacrificial achievements 
of past ages, fine and beautiful human incarnations of 
the Divine. Above all, we are not to forget the redemption, 
perfect and final, wrought for our race, in the eternal 
Son of God. 

Yet there are some things behind which must be for- 
gotten. We must exercise a steadfast ability to let go 
in order to lay hold. We must forget past failures. We 
should chisel our failures into stepping-stones to higher 
things. We must forget and forgive past wrongs. God 
can not live in a heart which has become the home of hate. 
Either God or hate must go. And hate will have to go, 
if God is graciously besought to remain. We must forget 



98 The I]sm]sriTE Aetist and Other Sermons 

past sins. God has forgotten them, if they have been re- 
pented of and forsaken. Why should you be haunted with 
that which God has cast behind His back ? We must for- 
get past attainments in character. Some one has said 
that we are all museums of the past, in which are stored 
its relics. In a sense it is quite true. But we must 
see to it that those relics are not dust-covered. They must 
be retouched and added to. Indeed, they must become 
more than relics. They must become vivid, glowing, 
spiritual realities. 

Thus even our imperfect and sin-clouded past may be 
made to yield a new harvest of present and future good. 
And no man, it is needless to say, will attempt this without 
a firmer grip upon the inmost centrality of life. He will 
discover the Eternal beating back of the transient. Out of 
the world's old and worn familiarities will come new joys, 
new insights, new and larger infoldings of the Divine. 
Oliver Wendell Holmes was once shown through West- 
minster Abbey. Amidst the imposing recollections of the 
ancient edifice, he says, one impressed him in the inverse 
ratio of its importance. This was the little holes on the 
stones of the cloister benches. Here the boys of the Mo- 
nastic School "used to play marblesi, before America was 
discovered probably — centuries before, it may be. It is 
a strangely impressive glimpse of a living past, like the 
graffiti of Pompeii." JsTaturally everything becomes "a 
living past," if only there is the seeing eye. E'ow the 
most ordinary person moves through a more wondrous 
abbey than old Westminster. It is the abbey of his own 
soul-world. All dear memories are housed there. All 
holy aspirations are chanting their music there. All high 
hopes are clustering there. AH new and old things mingle 
there, ministering each to the other. Therefore, why may 
we not, here and now, realize with Paul the worth of 
these two things: a vivid sense of the unattained, and a 
steadfast ability to let go: "Brethren, I count not my- 



New and Old 99 

self yet to have laid hold ; but one thing I do, forgetting 
the things which are behind." So may we discover a 
vernal newness within the secret place of the mystic old- 
ness. 

II 

Consider the Oldness in the l^ew: "And stretching 
forward to the things which are before, I press on toward 
the goal nnto the prize of the high calling of God in Christ 
Jesus.'' Are not the things before timeless things ? And 
is not the goal old enough? Why, it is older than the 
worlds! It was set up before times eternal. Reaching 
that goal is the task of every man. Herein is the prob- 
lem of human life. It seems to me that our text suggests 
two ways of solving the problem. There is to be, first, 
an energetic effort to go on; and, second, a definite con- 
ception of the goal. 

"I press on!" And why an energetic effort to go on? 
Well, because of humanity's deep-seated, ancient creed. 
Men have always held that the things before are more 
and better than the things behind. There in the eternal 
oldness are things in reserve which will ever give to life's 
last swift second a joyous newness. Human life, at its 
best, is full of rich suggestiveness just here. For exam- 
ple, there is Moses. His service to humanity is a royal 
service, indeed. But where does Moses loom so large and 
splendid as on Mount iN'ebo ? Egypt, with its bitter mem- 
ories, has faded from his view. The lone wanderings in 
the desert are over. He is standing at last on the top of 
Pisgah. "And the Lord showed him all the land!" Ah! 
I wonder if, in that vision hour, Moses did not also see 
the Land beyond the Judean sunsets ?' And I wonder, too, 
if that vision did not draw the things behind up into 
Heaven's clear, golden sky, setting them alongside the 
things before, as each shed its own lustrous glory upon 
the other? Surely, Moses can now translate the lightning 



100 The Infii^ite Aetist and Other Seemons 

flashes of Sinai. And are not tJiose diamond flames aglow 
with majestic meanings? And were they not luminous 
hints of the more and better things before ? 

O, my brethren, what light the best men in their best 
hours shed upon the things before ! And the moments of 
their translation seem to reveal their true character. I 
think just now of Dean Stanley. A man having a vast 
circle of great friends said : "Stanley was the purest, most 
childlike, most beautiful spirit I have ever known." He 
is said to have been a perfect illustration of this definition 
of genius: "Genius is the heart of childhood taken up 
and matured in the powers of manhood." One day this 
sweet, strong, gracious soul lay dying in the deanery of 
England's great abbey. Friends were reading to him and 
praying for him. At last one friend slipped into the hands 
of another Stanley's favorite hymn, by Wesley: 

"Come, O thou traveler -unknown, 
Whom still I hear and can not see. 

My company before is gone, 
And I am left alone with thee; 

Alone with thee I mean to stay, 

And wrestle till the break of day." 

And finally the day broke, clear as a sea of glass mingled 
with fire. Stanley passed "to where beyond these voices 
there is peace." And where, also, as we fondly believe, 
the things before lift the dark things behind up into the 
clear white light of Heaven's day. 

A dozen years later a kindred spirit and friend of 
Dean Stanley is awaiting God's chariot in Boston. Phil- 
lips Brooks, too, is going home. The physicians are con- 
sulting in an adjoining room. William Gray Brooks 
is alone with his passing brother. Let him tell us about it : 

"Phillips knew me. He looked up from his pillow with 
the sweetest smile, and held out his hand. Hie pressed 



!New and Old 101 

mine warmly and strongly, smiled again and again, and 
once or twice said, 'Good-night.' Then he lay back on 
the pillow, put his great left hand on his heart, and smiled 
and nodded his head with his eyes full on mine. Then 
he raised his right hand with the forefinger extended, 
and waved it round and round for several moments, as 
he used to do when hearing music, or humming some 
tune to himself. It was clear and bright and happy. 
Full of the joy that was in his heart — in harmony with 
the love that filled it, and with the heavenly melodies that 
he heard calling him to his eternal home, full of rest 
and life." 

Do not these and all great souls tell us that the things 
before are better than the things behind ? They light up 
that great saying of Tertullian: ''The soul is by nature 
Christian.'' For Christianity is the fulfilling of human 
nature and destiny. And here, too, is the unspeakable 
glory of the Christian Heaven. It is always better farther 
on. Hazlitt once read these words on an Italian sun-dial : 
'T take note only of the shining hours." This is certainly 
not true of our religion. For it takes note of the dark, the 
lonely, the shadowed hours. Then it illumines them with 
a revealing splendor. It is this that keeps humanity's 
soul alive. It is this that empowers us to press on. It 
is this that creates a quenchless zest for spiritual inva- 
sion. For Heaven is as old as the God Who makes it. And 
Heaven is as new as a redeemed spirit's last thrilling ex- 
perience of God's love. Arnold of Rugby nobly expressed 
his faith in this dear Heaven of us all. An aunt of the 
immortal teacher had rounded out her seventy-seventh 
milestone. Arnold wrote to her : 

"I pray that God will keep you, through Jesus Christ, 
with all blessing, under every trial, which your age may 
bring upon you, and if, through Christ, we meet together 



102 The Infii^ite Aetist aistd Other Sermons 

after the resurrection, there will theii be nothing of old 
or young — of health or sickly — of clear memory or con- 
fused — ^but we shall be all one in Christ Jesus." 

Thus have all Christian spirits felt, with Browning: 
"The best is yet to be." 

Thus, too, have they witnessed this good confession : 

"I know that earth is not my sphere, 
Por I can not so narrow me but that 
I shall exceed it." 

Thus, also, have they exclaimed, with the dying Para- 
celsus : 

"If I stoop 
Into a tremendous sea of cloud 
It is but for a time; I press God's lamp 
Close to my breast; its splendor soon or late 
Will pierce the gloom. I shall emerge some day." 

The other truth, which binds the new and the old like 
a signet ring, is a definite conception of the goal. "I 
press on," says Paul, ^'toward the goal unto the prize 
of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus." Herein is 
the Christian hope that excelleth. God has, in his be- 
loved Son, shown usi the true pattern of our lives. Con- 
sider this truth in its twofold aspect. 

Pirst, I see in the Lord Christ my manhood as it ought 
to be. This is the vision that haunts us all. Have we 
wronged our own souls? Have we injured our human 
brothers? Have we shut out the light of the all-radiant 
God ? Have we been disloyal to our privileges. ? Have we 
proven faithless to friendships? In a word, have we 
turned life's "encircling gloom" into the "absolutest 
drench of dark ?" It may be even so. Yet, in their un- 
hallowed despair, men can glimpse more than "stray 



"New Am) Old 103 

beautj-beams" darting through their night. They know 
that this flaming hell of sin is not their true place. They 
know that their manhood, as it ought to be, has been lifted 
by Christ to yonder shining heights far above them. This 
fact is as clear as noonday. It is as native to the soul as 
spring sunshine is native to the buried seed. For He 
is indeed the divine-human crystal, the sovereign Seer 
of time, the poets' Poet, wisdom's tongue, man's best 
man, love's best love! 

"Thou seemest human and divine; 
The highest, holiest manhood thou; 
Our wills are ours, we know not why : 
Our wills are ours to make them thine." 

"For in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead 
bodily, and ye are complete in him." 

But beholding in Christ Jesus my manhood as it ought 
to be is not enough. I see also in Him my manhood as it 
may be, my manhood as God hath said it shall 
be: my manhood as the indwelling Holy Spirit whis- 
pers it is coming to be. What a word is this of St. John : 
"No man hath seen God at any time; God only begotten, 
which dwelleth in the bosom of the Father, he hath de- 
clared him!" We talk and sing and dream about the 
bosom of a mother. Ah! gather the sweet and wooing 
gentlenesses, the rich and nestling tendernesses, which 
have throbbed in all the bosoms of all the mothers in all 
the human years! But they can only feebly suggest the 
gentleness and tenderness "which dwelleth in the bosom 
of the Father!" And oh, the secrets of that wondrous 
bosom have been unveiled in the only begotten Son ! He 
hath declared the unseen Father. And why hath He de- 
clared Him? Why, for this God-conceived reason: that 
our manhood and womanhood may be perfectly and fully 
realized in Him. This is not an impictured fancy, it is an 
actualized reality. As Irenseus expressed it: "He became 



104 The Ii^Fiiq^iTE Aetist and Other Seemozsts 

what we are, that He might make us what Hb is." For 
in declaring God, He also declares to you and me : 

"All I could never be. 
All, men ignored in me. 
This, I was worth to God, whose wheel the 
Pitcher shaped/' 

^'Beloved, now are we children of God, and it is not yet 
made manifest what we shall be. We know that, if He 
shall be manifested, we shall be like Him ; for we shall see 
Him even as He is.'' 

Surely, my friends, both new and old find their true 
meaning in Him. Even in the midst of the years He lifts 
us above the whirl of the years. He lights up the dark 
things behind from the splendor-fount of things before. 
Our heavenward call has become the spiritual melody of 
our earthward walk. Let us press on and upward ! For 
the vanishing goals of time must give place to the many 
mansions of the Father's house. Then aches will have 
become balms, and pains will have become palms. Gone 
forever twilight and dark. Gone forever defeat and 
despair. Gone forever tired bodies and tired brains. 
Gone forever unfair, untrue, unjust, unbeautiful things. 
Gone forever sighing and crying. For the fountain of 
human tears has emptied its last bitter drop into the silver 
river of divine joy. And we shall be satisfied when we 
awake with His likeness! 



IX 

THE DEEAMER 

"And they said one to another. Behold, this dreamer cometh. 
Come now therefore, and let us slay him, and cast him into one 
of the pits, and we will say. An evil beast hath devoured him: 
and we shall see what will become of his dreams." — Gen. 
xxxvii. 20. 

Our sermon has to do with one of those highly exas- 
perating characters — the dreamer. A kind of universal 
misfit, the dreamer has two fatal defects. The first is 
that he should have dreams at all. Cobblestones we know 
and gold and iron; but dreams and dreamers — somehow 
they do not harmonize with our ordinary blare and brass. 
The second defect is that he insists on telling his dreams. 
It is bad enough to know that there are such things and 
creatures as dreams and dreamers; but to be insistently 
reminded of such abstract and ethereal nonentities — ^that 
is taking entirely too much liberty with a practical world 
like ours ! And the dreamer is always on our hands. He 
has ever been here ; he was away back there in the world's 
yesteryears. He is here to-day; when all of our eager, 
hurrying folk are eagerly and hurriedly forgotten, the 
dreamer's dream will abide. The dreamer will also haunt 
the tbrobbing streets of our unknown to-morrows. Yet 
what a difficult character is he ! We despise the dreamer, 
and we love him; we curse him, and we adore him; we 
crucify him, and we crown him. We feel somewhat 
toward the dreamer as the Earl of Southampton felt 
toward Spenser, when the poet brought him the manu- 
script of "The Faerie Queene" to read. After reading a 

105 



106 The Ii^fhstite Aetist ai^d Other Seemoi^s 

little, the patron of literature commanded his secretary 
to give the poet twenty pounds. Eeading awhile longer, 
he exclaimed: ''Carry the man another twenty pounds." 
Enthralled yet- more, he read and called: "Give him 
twenty pounds more." At last he said: "Go turn that 
fellow out of the house ; for if I read further, I shall be 
ruined." Thus, like Joseph's brothers, we either cast the 
dreamer into a pit or else turn him out-of-doors to get rid 
of him. 

Of course the words of my text are saturated with sar- 
casm and they bite like acid. For in our hard, practical 
world there seems to be no room for the dreamer. But 
it is in the seeming only. The fact is, history vindicates 
the dreamer; and notwithstanding all of our real and 
apparent harshness toward him, the dreamer has abundant 
room. In the first place, he does not require much space. 
Partaking somewhat of the ethereal stuff upon which 
he feeds, his dimensions are such that he does not require 
large acres of real estate. In the second place, the prop- 
erties which satisfy the dreamer are of little worth to 
most people; consequently, he always has an abundant 
supply of the things essential to his own well-being. Does 
he not feed upon visions and colors and silences and hopes 
and loves and fears and prayers ? Most of us dine upon 
this insubstantial fare when we are compelled to do so, 
but it is the daily food of the dreamer ; and his cupboard 
is generally well-filled, is it not ? In the third place, the 
dreamer is only really known after he has gone. Blind 
to his beauty and wonder when he went in and out amongst 
them, once he has vanished from their sight, men beffin 
to ask : "What has become of that dreamer, anyway ? He 
was a nuisance, we all agree. He said things and did 
things that were irritating: and yet^ — and yet — ^well, per- 
haps he wasn't such a fool, after all! Come now there- 
fore, let us build unto him a monument of brass — per- 
chance it will help to hide our own. Let us build it 



The Deeamee 107 

broad and lofty and high — this monument of brass — 
equal to our own." 

I 

Consider the dreamer's coming: "And they said one 
to another, Behold this dreamer cometh." We remark, 
first of all, that the dreamer's coming introduces new 
epochs. His name may be Joseph the Hebrew, Homer 
the Greek, Yirgil the Homan, Confucius the Chinese, 
Galileo the Italian, Shakespeare the Englishman, Luther 
the German, or Christ the Eternal. For the dreamer's 
fatherland is the universe ; his home is roofed by all stars 
and carpeted by the greens of all summers and the snows 
of all winters; his brotherhood is composed of all high 
fellowships out of all climes and countries and ages; he 
is at home nowhere just because he is at home every- 
where. He thinks that the color of God's Face is neither 
white nor red nor brown nor black; that He is neither 
English, French, German, Japanese, Italian, Russian, nor 
American; but that there is "one God and Father of all. 
Who is over all, and through all, and in all." There- 
fore, his soul is a garden planted with the seeds of vision. 
This dreamer is Newton, and his mind is alive with the 
law of gravity. That dreamer is Harvey, and he discloses 
the law of the circulation of the blood. Still another 
dreamer is Watt, and he invents the steam engine. Yes, 
here comes this dreamer. Get out of his way, or he will 
walk right through you! You can't dodge him and you 
can't escape him. Look anywhere in history and you 
cannot miss him ; he is loaded with the forces which, when 
released, will destroy old eras and introduce new ones. 
He has given you your commerce, your telegraph, your 
wireless waves, your airplane, your automobile — ^back of 
all your visible wealth stands this invisible wealth- 
creator ! 

Very much in the way of his contemporaries, the 



108 The Iitfinite Artist and Other Sermons 

dreamer is nevertheless an unwelcome benediction to tbem. 
He keeps us on the physical and spiritual move; he lifts 
our faces from the muck and sets them on higher things. 
We condemn him, and then v^e doom him ; but we cannot 
subsist without him. And are we not unwilling learners, 
sitting at the feet of those we despise? I^Tot consciously 
so — not at all; we are scarcely noble enough for that; 
but we do, even while we are in the process of being made, 
unwillingly manage to pick up a few ideas dropped from 
the dreamer's seething brain. And all this we do, by 
the grace of our many-colored inconsistency, even while 
we are lustily applauding majorities and unblushingly 
proud of our ability to ape the current moral, mental, 
social, and political fashions! Yet, through all our 
bravado, the dreamer is kneading the food by which we 
live. 

For we cannot evaluate the dreamer by short and sud- 
den views. He is one of those tremendous factors whose 
coming requires long looks. Consider, for example, the 
dreamer's coming in relation to the woolen industry. Per- 
haps any other would serve quite as well, but none sur- 
passes it in interest. Wool, of course, comes from sheep, 
^ow the ancestor of our beautiful domestic sheep was 
the argali. Do you realize that it was the argali, a cousin 
to the bighorn of the Rocky Mountains, that changed men 
from nomadic savages to something resembling a commu- 
nity life? And how? Why, because a dreamer came 
among the cave-dwellers. Up to the time of his coming, 
men used the skins of wild beasts for clothing. But one 
day a cave-dweller killed an argali and brought it home. 
!N"o animal grew wool as yet, but a dreamer said : "Why, 
the fur of the argali is softer and warmer than the skins 
of all other animals. Let us use it for clothing." Whereat 
all the cave-men laughed a raucous laugh. "Our ancestors 
wore skins for clothing," they protested. "Would it not 



The Deeamer 109 

be unpatriotic for us, tJieir descendants, children of our 
Paleolithic Pilgrim Fathers, to introduce foreign customs 
into our great and glorious land ?" But the dreamer con- 
tinued to reason with his fellow-citizens. In due season 
they captured and brought home the young of the argali 
uninjured. The little cave-children and the little argali 
played together. At last man invented the bow and arrow, 
which made him master over the fierce, wild beasts. Mean- 
time, the argali not only multiplied but it became a 
sheep. Its goatlike hair became soft and woolly. Also 
men themselves were gradually changed. Gentled some- 
what by this gentle creature, man had more time to think. 
Brain slowly superseded brawn. The wild hunters be- 
came herders of sheep, and the pastoral age had dawned. 
The shepherd now knew how to remove the wool without 
destroying the manufactory — the sheep. After countless 
ages came spinning; and weaving, ^ow it is a long jour- 
ney from the argali to the first sheep in America. They 
were brought to Virginia in 1607. In 1633 Massachu- 
setts also imported sheep; and to protect them from 
wolves the Pilgrim Fathers herded them on an island 
in Boston Harbor. Have you forgotten that the colossal 
wool industries of America were founded in 1638 by a 
dreamer and a preacher as well — Ezekiel Bogers? l^ow 
tens of thousands of years elapsed between the dreaming 
cave-dweller and the dreaming Puritan clergyman. But 
what are ten thousand as^es but the bursting foam upon 
that infinite Stream of Consciousness, freighted with the 
dreams of universes and worlds and civilizations — ^Whose 
eddies are empires and Whose breaking spray are l^ine- 
vehs and Tyres and Babylons and Bomes ? Finallv, the 
Ftemal Dreamer is humanized. The blind, the halt, the 
lame, the harlot, the leper, the thief, the lonely, the for- 
gotten, the frail, the small, the great, the rich, the T>oor 
— all look upon the Dreamer from Eternity and exclaim : 



110 The Iiq-Fii^iTE Aetist and Other Seemons 

"Behold, this Dreamer cometh. The Dayspring from on 
high hath visited us. Glory to God in the highest, and 
on earth peace among men in whom He is well pleased !" 

"All's vast that vastness means. Nay, I affirm 
Nature is whole in her least things expressed, 
Nor know we with what scope God builds the worm. 
Our towns are copied fragments from our breast; 
And all man's Babylons strive but to impart 
The grandeurs of his Babylonian heart." 



II 

Hard upon the dreamer's coming follows the dreamer's 
fate : "Come now therefore, and let us slay him, and cast 
him into some pit, and we will say, An evil heast hath 
devoured him." Is not the world's treatment of the 
dreamer ignobly consistent? Undouhtedly it is. These 
pastoral brethren of Joseph seem to have set the pace and 
the centuries have kept it up. What, then, are the steps 
which mark the dreamer's fate? They are three; con- 
sider them well, because they are familiar and instructive. 

The first step is destruction. "Let us slay him." N'ow 
there are various methods of destruction. Some are phys- 
ical — the dagger, the bullet, dynamite, poisoned gas, centi- 
meter guns, swift mechanical birds that drop explosive 
eggs of death while on the wing. But there are other 
ways of destroying the dreamer — ^ways far less gruesome, 
but in no sense less cruel. Wholesale slander is one 
method. Some call it "campaigning." The proper name 
is deliberate, cunning, malicious, downright lying and 
slander. Washinsrton, Lincoln, Wilson, and Harding all 
understand the infamy of this method of destruction. 
There are few more sinister evils in America than this 
monstrous practice of which political parties are guilty. 
Politicians, partisans, and editors are the ringleaders in 
this infamous business. Has it come to this — that the 



The Deeamee 111 

issues of a campaign are lost or won by the ability of one 
political party to manufacture and scatter broadcast more 
falsehoods than another and opposing political party? 
And it is just because we know that most of the state- 
ments made in our presidential and other campaigns are 
not true that we ought to be made to see the terrible 
wrong, the awful iniquity we are constantly committing 
as a people. For, mark my words, it is not the lied about 
who suffer most ; in the end it is the unconscionable slan- 
derers themselves who are the most abject victims of their 
own perversity. This species of national sin is not con- 
fined to politics ; it works like a poison in social, domestic, 
clerical, commercial, medical, scientific, legal, and finan- 
cial circles. Its animus is malignantly destructive; it 
would slay the finest thing in life — character — ^by the foul- 
est weapon it can wield — slander! 

The second step is burial alive. The original design 
was point-blank destruction; but the counsel of some 
Reuben is heeded, and the conspirators do not actually 
commit murder; they "cast him into one of the pits." 
Yes; any one of the pits will do for a dreamer. There 
are pits a-plenty — and is not the true dreamer very 
rare and most annoyin^ly in the way? Cast him in, 
therefore, and be rid of him ! And are not our twentieth 
century pits quite as deep as those old oriental cisterns? 
There are, for instance, financial pits and business pits 
and religious pits and social pits and intellectual pits and 
religious pits and national and international pits — oh, the 
pits are countless, close at hand, and ready for their occu- 
pants. Call the roll of the pit-dwellers, and it is unduly 
lar2:e. Ask Jeremiah and Paul and Dante and Savonarola 
and Caribaldi and Gladstone and Lincoln and Roosevelt 
and Wilson if they are acquainted with pits, and both the 
livin.or and the dead can speak with first-hand, intimate 
knowledge ! 

The third step is self -exoneration : "And we will say, 



112 The Iitfiitite Artist and Other Sermons 

An evil beast hath devoured him." Are not Joseph's de- 
signing brothers our veritable contemporaries in excuse- 
making ? We modems may be more subtle in framing our 
bills of self -exoneration than the ancients; but the spirit 
is identical. We lay the plan and execute it, but in what 
a different light does the deed itself make everything ap- 
pear ! Herein is a part of the deadly and deceptive power 
of sin. Men administer opiates to conscience; conscience 
is put to sleep; and everything glides along "as merry as 
a marriage bell." Then conscience wakes up and the fires 
of mental and spiritual hells bum seven times hotter than 
iN'ebuchadnezzar's or Dante's. Oh^ no! the awakening 
does not always come while men are in the flesh; for 
"some men's sins are evident, going before unto judgment ; 
and some men also they follow after." But they follow 
and they overtake — ^make no mistake about it. Be sure 
your sin will find you out; like a wild beast it crouches 
at the door, ready to spring at the most unexpected mo- 
ment. And yet, notwithstanding this truth in the nature 
of thinsrs, do we not trump up our self-exonerations and 
say : "Some evil beast of heredity or environment has done 
this mischief?" Durina; those awful days of battle on 
the Somme Philip Gibbs says a German prisoner re- 
marked : "This war was not made in any sense by man- 
kind. We are under a spell." ^NTow I believe in givin.q* 
the devil his dues; but is it not too easy and smug and 
unfair to lay all the blame on that side ? T, for one, be- 
lieve that German militarists deliberately willed the war, 
and that it was aided and abetted in its world-wide crime 
by rotten European political society, feeding upon the 
carrion of secret diplomacy, avarice, jealousy, hate, poli- 
ticians, trusts, profiteers, and international rivalries. The 
old slogan was, "Tn time of peace, prepare for war;" a 
new and better slosran is, "Tn time of peace, prepare to 
prevent war." War is not suddenlv made; war is the 
explosive effect produced by smoldering causes. Oh, 



The Deeameb 113 

nations, bled-white and bankrupt, "whence come wars and 
whence come fightings among you? come they not hence, 
even of your pleasures that war in your members? Ye 
lust, and have not : ye kill, and covet, and cannot obtain ; 
ye fight and war ; ye have not, because ye ask not." Wars 
are made in streets of pleasure and casinos of idleness 
and boulevards of lust; they are simply consummated on 
fields of agony and dugouts of death and craters of hell. 
Therefore, let us not cast our Prince of Peace into one of 
our gigantic modern pits and say: "The devil or some 
evil beast has done this." 'Not so easily shall we escape 
when the judgment-dooms are read. For whatsoever 
nations sow, as well as individuals — that shall they also 
reap. 

Ill 

Consider, also, that the dreamer's coming and the 
dreamer's fate are prophetic of the dreamer's harvest. 
"And we shall see what will become of his dreams." In- 
deed we shall! There will be a famine in the land be- 
fore many moons. These false brethren, their families, 
and their neighbors will come to want and starvation. 
Then will they go down into Egypt seeking for corn, and 
lo ! this dreamer has the corn ! For dreams, like com, are 
vital, fertile seeds. Cast your dreams into the soil of 
human life, my friends, and there is a quickness at the 
soul of things which will bestir them into a white and 
golden harvest. Behold a dreamer named Columbus. An 
outcast among men, dying broken-hearted and forsaken 
by all save God and the future, he dreamed and dared and 
dared and dreamed until he added a new continent to civi- 
lization. Behold a dreamer named l^ewton. Born in the 
same year that Galileo died, Newton dreamed a vaster uni- 
verse for mankind. "God has waited thousands of years," 
said he, "for a man to see what I have seen. Surely I can 
wait a few hundred for men to accept my vision." Be- 



114 The Ii^fii^ite Aetist and Other Seemons 

hold the mightiest Dreamer of them all — the Name that 
is above every name — He of whom John Morley says: 
^^The spiritual life of the West has burned during all 
these centuries with the pure flame first kindled by the 
sublime Mystic of the Galilean Hills." A man said to 
Wendell Phillips that Jesus was amiable but not strong. 
"JSTot strong?" flashed back the great orator and scholar. 
^'Test the strength of Jesus by the strength of the men 
whom He has mastered. He mastered Saul of Tarsus. 
And the mastery empowered him ; for while yet a man of 
few cubits in stature, he towered above his contemporaries, 
and while scarcely a man in height, he walked among men 
with such mighty strides that he shook the throne of the 
imperial Caesars." On October 23, 1852, Daniel Webster 
said to his physician: "I shall die to'-night." With deep 
emotion the doctor answered: ^'You are right, sir." In 
the twilight of that day the last will and testament of 
the sublimest orator in history was brought to him for 
his signature. Having signed the document Webster said : 
"Thank God for strength to do a sensible act! O God, 
I thank Thee for all Thy mercies." Then his family 
gathered about his bedside. Curtis, his biographer, seeing 
that Mr. Webster was about to say something which should 
be recorded, seated himself at a table. Then, speaking 
slowly and in a voice that could be heard through half 
the house, Webster said : "My general wish on earth has 
been to do my Master's will. That there is a God all must 
acknowledge. I see Him in all these wondrous works. 
Himself how wondrous! What would be the condition 
of any of us, if we had not the hope of immortality ? What 
ground is there to rest upon but the Gospel ? There were 
scattered hopes of the immortality of the soul, especially 
among the Jews. The Jews believed in a spiritual origin 
of creation. The Eomans never reached it; the Greeks 
never reached it. It is a tradition that communication 



The Deeamee 115 

was made to the Jews by God Himself through Moses. 
There were intimations, erepnscular, twilight. But, but, 
but, thank God! the Gospel of Jesus Christ brought life 
and immortality to light, rescued it, brought it to light." 
Consider, as Wendell Phillips said, the men whom Christ 
has mastered ; and then consider a second thing : Why has 
He not mastered you? 

Oh, my friends, all of our hopes are bound up with the 
harvest of our Invisible, Immortal, and Eternal Dreamer ! 
!N'ot yet have His dreams of a regenerated earth been ac- 
cepted by mankind. But into the soil of our lost humanity 
He has dropped the seeds of the Atonement, Repentance, 
Forgiveness, Faith, Service, Sacrifice, Prayer, Brother- 
hood, Eternal Life; and as the seasons of God come and 
go we shall surely see what will become of His dreams — 
yea, we shall see the new heavens and the new earth, 
wherein dwelleth righteousness. Meantime, let us accept 
the larger of the two visions in the dreamer's song : 

"A boy was born 'mid little things, 
Between a little world and sky, 
And dreamed not of the cosmic rings 
'Round which the circling planets fly. 

He lived in little works and thoughts. 
Where little ventures grow and plod, 

And paced and plowed his little plots. 
And prayed unto his little God. 

But, as the mighty system grew, 

His faith grew faint with many scars ; 

The cosmos widened in his view. 
But God was lost among his stars. 

Another boy in lowly days, 

As he, to little things was bom. 
But gathered lore in woodland ways. 

And from the glory of the mom. 



116 The Infinite Aetist and Other Seemons 

As wider skies broke on his view, 
God greatened in his growing mind; 

Each year he dreamed his God anew, 
And left his older God behind. 

He saw the boundless scheme dilate, 
In star and blossom, sky and clod; 

And, as the universe grew great, 
He dreamed for it a greater God." 



X 

AN ABOUNDING PEKSONALITY ^ 

Time and Space and Matter are interesting subjects 
to the philosopher. One reason for their abiding interest 
lies in the fact that he is never quite satisfied with his 
own definitions of them. He defines them, and then he 
re-defines them, because they elusively escape all the 
mental molds in which they are cast. But far more in- 
teresting than Time and Space and Matter is Personality. 
What is it ? Where did it come from ? Why is it here in 
the fields of time ? Whither does it go after laying aside 
its medium of flesh? This is the enchanted ground for 
the thinkers of every age. And little wonder! There is 
no reason for saying that God is engaged in creating any 
more space or any more matter; God's supreme interest 
for a thousand ages seems to have been in the realm of 
personality. This is His big work throughout the uni- 
verse. Therefore, when an unusual person comes our way, 
we somehow feel that the cosmos has hung over the fences 
of matter a flower whose beauty and fragrance are of 
immeasurable value to God and human kind. Doctor 
Frank Wakely Gunsaulus was, above everything else, a 
predominant personality. And this is simply to confess 
that he is an illustration of the finest and best product God 
has to show within His worlds. Some are in the habit of 
asserting: "This man or that man was not an original 
thinker, but he was a radiant, glowing personality" — ^the 
inference being, of course, that a great, original thinker is 

'Delivered in the Academy of Music, Brooklyn, N. Y., Sunday 
morning, April 3, 1921. 

117 



118 The Infinite Artist and Otheb Sermons 

superior to a great, original personality. Is not this a 
mistaken emphasis? If the universe is conducted in the 
interests of personality, the mistake is readily apparent. 
For it is to argue that thinking is greater than being, is 
greater than character; that thought, which is only one 
of the manifestations of mind, is of more worth than the 
total manifestations of mind, which are gathered up and 
flashed forth through personality. The conclusion must 
be that the ample personality stands higher in the scale 
of being than the so-called great thinker. I am to speak, 
therefore, of a rich and rounded personality rather than 
of a fragment thereof — the mere thinker. 



Let us think, first, of our friend's genius in the dear 
and intimate circle of home. I often look out upon Lake 
Michigan from my study window. Yonder it rolls, as 
he has described it, in its "sea-green splendor.'' And is 
not the lake a kind of liquid picture of his own soul- 
movements ? There is first the ripple, then the wave, and 
then the billow. So the play of his personality over the 
home-circle — that is the ripple. The movement here is 
gentle, noiseless, serene, shut off from the large waves 
and thunderous billows lashing the shores of the great 
world. There is a certain beautiful pathos in his family's 
picture of a great man as contrasted with the public's pic- 
ture of him. While members of the home-circle are aware 
of his public greatness, they think of his greatness in a 
different way. "He was your great citizen," says the 
wife, "but he was my husband." "He was your princely 
orator," say the children, "but he was our father." "He 
was your brilliant teacher," exclaim the grandchildren, 
"but he was our happy playfellow and joyous companion." 

All this is tenderly true of Doctor Gunsaulus, because 
he was such a many-sided person. If "nature is whole in 
her least parts expressed," so is this rich human's wholeness 



Aisr Abotji^ding Personality 119 

in tlie little things, tlie nnheralded flowers of love lie 
planted and tended in tlie Garden of Home. Sometimes a 
grandchild wonld receive an envelope addressed in his own 
handwriting. Opening the letter, the little girl would take 
out a bright, neatly folded piece of tinfoil. He knew that 
it was of more worth to her than a shining silver dollar. 
Knowing and loving children, he took time to remember 
and gratify the innocent loves of childhood. If we are 
normal men and women, we all love children; but how 
many of ns, in the rush and hurry of life, take time to 
send them little foolish tokens of our love? Here was 
an exceedingly busy man — a man carrying tremendous 
problems in his heart, and brain — ^who could take time to 
be sublimely childlike. Sometimes a grandson would re- 
ceive a Pullman passenger check. The envelope contained 
no signature within ; the lad knew at once who had sent 
the check. And whv did this royal lover of the inner 
circle send that bit of worthless paper ? Because he knew 
a boy loves trains, dreams of trains, and plays with trains. 
On Thursday night a Chicago mother heard smothered 
sobs. Going to the bedside of her little boy, she found him 
buried beneath the cover and crying as if his childish 
heart were completely broken. "What's the matter, dear ?" 
she asked. Between his sobs, the grandchild replied: 
''You Tcnow what happened this morning." 

Yes; we all know what happened that morning. Be- 
tween the darkness and the dawn, the inner circle of this 
great lover's beinsr was broken into by the Angel of Life, 
and the flash of his noiseless, invisible wings made such 
a golden hush that we could hear the raining of our own 
tears from the cleft skies of the soul. This broken-hearted 
lad, weeping in the night, reminds us of the story told of 
Chicago's other famous child-lover, Eugene Pield. While 
the body of the poet was waiting for burial, a street urchin 
stole up to the door and rang the bell. The boy, it is 
said, made a strange request for one of his years. He 



120 The Ii^fii^ite Aetist ai^d Other Seemons 

asked that he might be alone with the quiet body of 
Eugene Field, l^obody knows what thoughts and emotions 
stirred in the boy's heart there in the silence beside the 
bier of our poet-laureate of childhood. It is enough to 
know that he was not afraid to be alone with death ; that 
Love, even in the form of a ragamuffin, is braver and 
stronger than death and binds the king of terrors with 
unbreakable fetters. I remember, in this connection also, 
that our preacher-poet wrote and read the following lines 
at the funeral services of Eugene Field on !N'ovember 6, 
1895. After picturing the children of every deeree— 
Wynken and Blynken and ^od — gathered about Field's 
grave, he sees Little Boy Blue leading them all : 

" 'O, Little Boy Blue! and how came you so far 
From lands beyond ocean and cloud-bank and star? 

Fared you all this way for your babyhood toy? 

Have you not forgotten our poet — and boy V 
He smiled as he moved with the children alone; 
Then waited and prayed o'er his loved and his own. 

" ' 'Tis not a great change,' said the Little Boy Blue, 
Trom beaven to earth,' — and he spake as he knew — 
T)ear children are there who have learned his song 
That Christ is the shepherd both tender and strong; 
In heaven, there's nothing so sweet in our joys 
As this, that we sing what we learned here as boys.' 

*Tull soon o'er God's Acre the robins will sing 
At birth of the dawn-light athrob with the spring; 
Their notes will be sweeter than ever, next June, 
When near your own grave they learn secrets of tune. 
The meadow-lark's wings, when the wild flowers unfold. 
Will flutter above you with music untold." 

Oh, Big Man with the child's heart, gold-tongued robins 
and meadow-larks will sing all the sweeter because they 
warble above your own God's Acre — "next June!" 



An Abounding Personality 121 



II 

Consider, in the second place, that the ripple which our 
friend's personality uroduced in the inner circle named 
home, has become a wave in the wider circle of friendship. 
"A friend," said Charles Kingsley, "is one whom we can 
always trust, who knows the best and the worst of us, and 
who cares for us in spite of our faults." In tones now 
mellow, now brilliant, but always beautiful, the splendor 
of his personality flashed through the overarching skies of 
his friendships. The morning he passed away the news 
went from our own home to a mutual friend who had not 
yet learned of his death. Instantly the surprised voice came 
back over the telephone : "Doctor Gunsaulus dead ! Why, 
he was my test friend/^ And that is what many around 
the earth felt and said. Does it not require a genius in 
the high art of friendship to make large numbers feel the 
magnetic pull and transfiguring thrill of his personality? 
Less than two weeks before his departure, he gloriously 
warned me against the too-ardent friendship of one very 
dear to both of us. ''Shannon/' he exclaimed, ''you must 
waich that man; he will love you too much; he will love 
you to death." I could not help smiling, even though a 
spray of tears was already falling upon the rainbow of 
laughter. And why? Because I knew and felt that in 
those words Frank Wakely Gunsaulus was innocently and 
unconsciously describing himself. More than once since 
that Sabbath day in his home, I have turned to a Little 
Book, and these are the words that are wet with tears: 
"Having loved His own that were in the world. He loved 
them unto the end." Like his Lord and Master, this man 
also loved people unto deatE — yea, and he loved them on 
and on, far beyond the reach of death — even in the 
heavenly homelands where temporarily severed friendships 
are reunited and cultivated forevermore. 



122 The IiNrFiNiTE Aetist ai^d Othee Seemoi^s 

"Raw, in this wider circle of his friendsliip — wherein 
the ripiple has become a wave — ^we are brought face to face 
with this proposition: The greater the personality the 
greater the variety of material and spiritual things it re- 
quires for its self-expression. A stunted personality does 
not demand much for the utterance of its total self. The 
club and the hut, with something to eat and little to wear, 
is about all the poor, undeveloj^ed savage needs. But a 
richer nature, the civilized man, asks for houses, comforts, 
and luxuries. True, he may and does expect too much from 
these things, ofttimes becoming their slave instead of their 
master; nevertheless, your modem man demands more 
than the aborigines because of his more richly developed 
and completely grown personality. Therefore, I want you 
to measure Doctor Gunsaulus by the many kinds of mate- 
rial he used in his self-disclosure. Sky, sea, land, picture, 
poem, music, book, building tool, — all were requisitioned 
by the versatility of his genius, vehicles commandeered to 
carry the wealth of his overflowing nature through the 
colorful streets of life. You are a philanthropist. You 
desired to invest your gold for the uplift of humanity. Did 
you not ask him to sit down with you and think the mat- 
ter through? It is literally true that he has helped 
men invest millions for God and mankind. You are 
an artist. You have a passion for transforming ap- 
parently separate and unrelated materials, tones, and 
colors into harmony, building, or picture. Did you not 
ask him to bring his eye for the beautiful, that he might 
lend to your own conceptions a kind of articulate and 
clarifying power ? You are an orator. You have read 
and dreamed of orators from childhood. Did you not 
think it one of the great privileges of your life to have 
him recount his own impressions of the mighty masters of 
speech; and, then, most of all, did not your heart- bum 
within you as he illustrated, through his marvelous elo- 
quence, the highest art within the human range? You 



An Abovnj>inq Peesonality 123 

are a poet. Your thoughts clothe themselves in verbal 
rhythms and metrical numbers. Did you not realize that 
he, too, was a brother-poet, "leading melodious days,'' and 
marching vs^ith tuneful steps ? You are an educator. You 
carry the problems and burdens of high school, academy, 
college, and university. Did you not hear him define "The 
Educated American" and heartily confess that he V7as an 
educated American indeed? You are a musician. You 
feel, with Sidney Lanier, that "music is love in search of 
a word." Did you never hear this passionate lover of 
music declare : "Music is the only one of the fine arts that 
is perfectly certain to survive in Heaven. Where all 
languages end, music begins." You are a bibliophilist. 
You love books — well, almost, just because they are books. 
You also love rare books, artistically made books, illumi- 
nated books, and manuscripts. How often has he touched 
you on the shoulder and whispered in your ear: "You 
must share this treasure with me." You are a doctor. 
Sitting in a public place one evening, he nudged me as 
some half dozen world-famous physicians and surgeons 
entered the room and sat down about a table. Then, in 
less than two minutes, he was over and among them, a 
welcome guest even in such distinguished scientific com- 
pany. You are a journalist. What a bureau of valuable 
information you often found in him ! You are a minister 
and theologian. Did you not invariably discover that he 
had something worth listening to on these vital subjects? 
Why, the wave of his genius flowed in amazing and ever- 
widening circles. He reminds me of two trees. The first 
is the tree of that old singer in the psalms. Like a tree 
planted by the streams of water. Doctor Gunsaulus brought 
forth fruit v^ith increasing power while the leaves of his 
goodness were green with unwithering vitality. The 
second tree he was like I saw in Brooklyn many years ago. 
I was calling on a dear old woman past ninety years of 
age. Looking through a window of the back room in 



124 The Infinite Artist and Other Sermons 

which we were sitting, I saw a quince tree. Standing in 
the comer of the lot at the junction of fences, its branches 
overhung parts of four yards. The tree was bending under 
its load of quinces^ and the yellow, juicy globes rained 
down into each of the yards. ''Look out there, Auntie 
BlanchardP' I exclaimed. ''Your fruit is falling over 
into the yards of your neighbors.'' Evidently, she did not 
share my surprise or excitement; for she remarked, some- 
what philosophically: "That's just the way it ought to 
be, isn't it ?" Thus our vanished friend was a far-spread- 
ing, ample-boughed, fruit-dropping human tree. His 
ripened fruits fell over into all the yards of life. And 
now that he has been transplanted in the heavenly 
orchards, the venerable woman's words come back to me 
with meaningful significance. So opulent, so strong, 
so myriad-minded was he that it seemed perfectly natural 
for his flavorous clusters to drop into receptive gardens, 
near and far. Or, to change the figure, and borrow the 
words of George William Curtis: "Like an illuminated 
vase of odors, he glowed with concentrated and perfumed 
fire." Or, better still, we may think of him in Tennyson's 
songful lines : 

'Tiove is and was my lord and king. 
And in his presence I attend 
To hear the tidings of my friend, 
Which every hour his couriers bring. 

Love is and was my king and lord, 
And will be, tho' as yet I keep 
Within the court on earth, and sleep 

Encompass'd by his faithful guard. 

And hear at times a sentinel 

Who moves about from place to place. 
And whispers to the worlds of space. 

In the deep night, that aU is well." 



An Abounding Peesonality 125 

III 

Consider the reach of his personality in the widest circle 
of all — the Christian ministry. Here the ripple has 
passed into the wave, and the wave has become a billow 
washing all shores. Eor Doctor Gunsaulus was, supremely, 
a ''good minister of Jesus Christ." Let us study tJie three- 
fold aspect of his ministry. 

First of all, reflect upon its uniqueness. I hold that 
the ministry of Frank W. Gunsaulus in the city of Chicago 
is without a parallel in American history. A few have 
equaled him as a preacher; a very select few have sur- 
passed him as a preacher — Eeecher and Brooks and Simp- 
son. But not one has sent forth such streams of influence 
into so many diflerent channels of a great city's life as 
did this man, for whom the chariots of God have lately 
swung low. I say the many-sidedness of his ministry is 
unparalleled in our annals. As a matter of fact, most of 
us do well in our desire and determination to do one thing ; 
but it is a source of joy now and then to see a man walk 
down our human ways, and, through the teeming wealth 
of his nature, have the very soil of his soul, like the earth 
in these spring days, ache and heave and stir with many 
kinds of mental and spiritual fruits and flowers. On hear- 
ing of his homegoing, and knowing of his love for chil- 
dren, I quoted the words of Francis Thompson: ^Took 
for me in the nurseries of Heaven." "But," answered my 
wife, "you will have to go beyond the nurseries for Doctor 
Gunsaulus. You will And him among the artists, the 
musicians, the poets, the orators, the educators, the 
preachers, and the prophets. He will be everywhere." 
Was it not a wise reply ? The uniqueness of his ministry- 
required many kinds of earth for the manifestation of 
his soul while in the flesh ; now that he wears his spiritual 
body, will he not also have to have many kinds of heavenly 



126 The IisTFiiiriTE Aktist and Othee Sermons 

reality for the utterance of his unfettered self? One of 
his friends said of the late John -Burroughs: ''Well, he 
used to wonder what it was like beyond and I suppose he 
will begin philosophizing again as soon as he gets his 
bearings. Ihere will be birds where John Burroughs is 
— birds and great trees.'' There will he souls where 1^'rank 
Gunsaulus is — souls and great music. 

A second aspect of his ministry is its rich humanness 
and genuine democracy. He was an aristocratic democrat 
— that is, he united the highest culture with the widest 
human sympathies. He was grandly free from class con- 
sciousness and untoward political partisanship. "I am a 
Eepublican,'' he said to me not long ago, ''because I be- 
lieve in a republic — a representative form of government 
— rather than in a pure democracy; but oh! how I do 
hate professional politicians V Even that holy and right- 
eous hatred was bom of his Christian love. I would to 
God that it might be born in the heart of every minister 
in America. Then he would not allow the professional 
politicians to make a fool of him, which is their first step 
in making a tool of him. 

All classes and conditions of humanity found in this 
minister and minstrel the shadow of a great rock in a 
weary land. Rich and poor, educated and uneducated, 
capitalist and laborer, young and old — ^he was to all as 
streams of water in a dry place. As chairman of Chicago's 
ITear East Relief Commission, he struggled out of bed, 
staggered to the telephone, and sent this message: "Use 
my name in any way you see fit to help in the Near East 
cause. If we lose Armenia, we lose the gateway. Do not 
thank me ; it is my duty." Fighting his valiant fight with 
death, and having already received his death-wound, this 
was among the very last of his eloquent pleas for a broken 
and bleeding humanity. While I was in Chicago some 
years ago, he took me through the Art Institute. I had 
three big, golden joys that day. The first was seeing the 



An Abounding Peksonality 127 

art treasures through his eyes; the second was hearing 
him interpret the pictures; the third and most wonderful 
of all was watching a newsboy who had wandered in from 
the street. Going from room to room, a steadily enlarg- 
ing company of people followed us, just to hear this lover 
of the beautiful interpret the beautiful in his own beautiful 
fashion. But that newsboy — I shall never, never forget 
him! The little fellow constantly wedged his way in be- 
tween Doctor Gunsaulus and myself. Once my attention 
was directed to the lad, I could not overlook him; for I 
discovered that he was not looking at the pictures, but 
always up at the face of Doctor Gunsaulus. There was 
something in the man's face that completely held the child. 
I think I know what it was, though I cannot describe it. 
Maybe I can help you to grasp it through a bit of history. 
The first time I ever saw him was many years ago in the 
Marble Collegiate Church on Fifth Avenue and Forty- 
eighth Street. It was during the summer season, and I 
was out of Brooklyn on my vacation. But a very dear 
friend, Mr. Edgar MacDonald, wrote to me, saying that I 
must come back to the city and hear Doctor Gunsaulus 
preach on Sunday. As he entered the pulpit, my friend 
turned to me and exclaimed, with deep emotion and glow- 
ing eyes: ''Isnt he heautifulf* It was just that, I think, 
that held the newsboy in the Art Institute. For the most 
beautiful being in the universe, next to God, is a beautiful 
soul. When this kind of a soul clothes itself in the shining 
raiment of intellect, will, memory, and imagination, you 
have a portrait too fine to permanently grace the walls of 
time ; it must be hung by angelic hands upon the walls of 
the City of God. ''Like a vase of illuminated odors, he 
glowed with concentrated and perfumed fire." 

As a third aspect of his ministry, think of its complete- 
ness. He slipped away on Thursday morning, March lYth, 
at four o'clock. The preceding Sunday he preached in 
the morning at the Hyde Park Presbyterian Church and 



128 The Infinite Artist and Othee Sermons 

in the evening at the Oak Park Presbyterian Church. At 
both services, and two weeks before Easter Sunday, he 
preached on ^'The Life Eternal,'' the text for morning and 
evening being: ^'This is eternal life, that they may know 
Thee, the only true God, and Him Whom Thou didst send, 
even Jesus Christ.'' He quoted, in the course of his 
morning sermon, Alan Seeger's poem, '^I Have a Eendez- 
vous with Death." Monday morning he asked me to come 
to the Armour Institute, saying that he had something very 
important to tell me. The first was concerning the endow- 
ment fund of Central Church, the necessity of increasing 
which he had emphasized at our annual dinner on March 
4th. ^^Shannon," he said, "I saw one will yesterday in 
which Central Church is remembered for $50,000, besides 
two other wills. The second thing I want to say is this : 
Aren't we happy, Shannon, over Central Church?" (This 
was one of his favorite and oft-repeated expressions re- 
garding the welfare of the institution he loved next to his 
own home.) Pausing for a moment, he went on: "You 
know I never preach nowadays, Shannon, that I don't feel 
like casting the net. I will soon be through here, and I 
want to draw in as many souls as possible. Before long, 
I will have to report over Yonder." As we came out of 
the room, he saw one of his students who did not walk 
erectly. He called to him : "Straighten up, young man ! 
Straighten up!" Those were the last tones of his voice 
that I remember, but I shall remember them forever. He 
went through life, shouting in trumpet notes to stooped 
and crooked causes : "Straighten up! Straighten up!" Mon- 
day evening he delivered his great address on "The Edu- 
cation of the American" before the Congregational Club 
of Chicago. On Wednesday afternoon, having piartially 
finished his forthcoming lectures on the Merrick Founda- 
tion of Ohio Wesleyan IJniversity, he straightened up, 
so my friend tells me, to his full height and said : "Now I 
am ready to go hach to my Mother's arms/' 



An Abounding Peesonality 129 

It would be at once unfair and artificial to read into 
these words meanings which our absent friend did not 
intend them to convey. But they are none the less won- 
drously suggestive. i)id he mean that his tired body was 
ready to return to the bosom of Mother Earth ? The day 
after his going, I visited that lovely burial plot in Forest 
Home. Close by stands a goodly oak t<ree. Its branches 
seemed like strings of a harp softly played by invisible 
wind-fingers, waiting to welcome the weary body back 
home. Or did he mean that he was ready to return to 
the arms of his Alma Mater? Or did he mean that he 
was ready to return to the arms of his beautiful human 
Mother, who has been waiting for him these four years 
by the River of Life? Oh, men, we are just men to the 
rest of the world, but we are always children to our 
Mothers. If we are true men, busily unfolding our best 
selves, we are always richly returning to the fountains 
of our childhood. Or did he mean that he was ready for 
the arms of the Infinite Motherhood — that Motherhood 
so tenderly drawn by the hand of a prophet of old : "As 
one whom his Mother comforteth, even so will I comfort 
you." But whatever he meant — and his words are capable 
of large variations — we believe that very much more than 
he meant has already been vouchsafed unto him in the 
White City of the Universe. 



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